    [House Hearing, 116 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                                 LOSING GROUND:
                            U.S. COMPETITIVENESS IN
                             CRITICAL TECHNOLOGIES

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   BEFORE THE

                          COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE,
                                 AND TECHNOLOGY
                            HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                         ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 SECOND SESSION

                                   __________

                                JANUARY 29, 2020

                                   __________

                               Serial No. 116-64

                                   __________

     Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

     [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

           Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov

                                   __________

                        U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
    39-555PDF                  WASHINGTON : 2021

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                  COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY

                 HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
    ZOE LOFGREN, California              FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma,
    DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois                Ranking Member
    SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon             MO BROOKS, Alabama
    AMI BERA, California,                BILL POSEY, Florida
        Vice Chair                       RANDY WEBER, Texas
    LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas               BRIAN BABIN, Texas
    HALEY STEVENS, Michigan              ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
    KENDRA HORN, Oklahoma                ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
    MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey           RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
    BRAD SHERMAN, California             MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
    STEVE COHEN, Tennessee               TROY BALDERSON, Ohio
    JERRY McNERNEY, California           PETE OLSON, Texas
    ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado              ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
    PAUL TONKO, New York                 MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
    BILL FOSTER, Illinois                JIM BAIRD, Indiana
    DON BEYER, Virginia                  FRANCIS ROONEY, Florida
    CHARLIE CRIST, Florida               GREGORY F. MURPHY, North Carolina
    SEAN CASTEN, Illinois                VACANCY
    BEN McADAMS, Utah
    JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
    CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania
    VACANCY

                             C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                                January 29, 2020

                                                                       Page

    Hearing Charter..................................................     2

                               Opening Statements

    Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman,
      Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
      Representatives................................................     7
        Written statement............................................     8

    Statement by Representative Frank Lucas, Ranking Member,
      Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
      Representatives................................................     8
        Written statement............................................    10

                                   Witnesses:

    Dr. Diane Souvaine, Chair, National Science Board
        Oral Statement...............................................    12
        Written Statement............................................    14

    Dr. Eric Schmidt, Founder, Schmidt Futures; Chairman, Defense
      Innovation Board; Chairman, National Security Commission on
      Artificial Intelligence
        Oral Statement...............................................    23
        Written Statement............................................    25

    Dr. Chaouki Abdallah, Executive Vice President for Research,
      Georgia Institute of Technology
        Oral Statement...............................................    32
        Written Statement............................................    34

    Discussion.......................................................    41

                 Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions

    Dr. Diane Souvaine, Chair, National Science Board................    72

    Dr. Eric Schmidt, Founder, Schmidt Futures; Chairman, Defense
      Innovation Board; Chairman, National Security Commission on
      Artificial Intelligence........................................    73

    Dr. Chaouki Abdallah, Executive Vice President for Research,
      Georgia Institute of Technology................................    75

                Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record

    Article submitted by Representative Sean Casten, Committee on
      Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives..    78

                                 LOSING GROUND:
                            U.S. COMPETITIVENESS IN
                             CRITICAL TECHNOLOGIES

                                  ----------

                          WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2020

                      House of Representatives,
                   Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
                                                       Washington, D.C.

        The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:04 a.m., in
    room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Eddie
    Bernice Johnson [Chairwoman of the Committee] presiding.

    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Johnson. The hearing will come to order. Without
    objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a recess at any
    time.
        Good morning to all. This hearing on United States
    competitiveness in critical technologies is our topic. And
    welcome to our distinguished panel of witnesses.
        United States leadership in science and technology has long
    given U.S. companies a competitive advantage, which in turn has
    led to job creation and increased standards of living for all
    Americans. It has also bolstered our national defense.
        However, as recent reports have underscored, the United
    States has already begun to face the consequences of our
    inability to make strategic and sustained long-term investments
    in our science and technology enterprise. For too long, we have
    coasted on the vision and political will that our leaders had
    in the 1950s, when they enacted the National Defense Education
    Act, and other seminal laws that invested in our Nation's
    talent and built the foundations for U.S. leadership in science
    and technology.
        We have risen to the challenge a few times since then, for
    example, the doubling of the NIH (National Institutes of
    Health) budget and the initiatives in the America COMPETES Act,
    including the creation of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects
    Agency-Energy). However, in the last 15 years, the non-defense
    research and development (R&D) budget has stagnated. We have
    been lamenting our domestic STEM (science, technology,
    engineering, and mathematics) pipeline challenge for decades,
    yet we have not made much progress.
        In the meantime, other countries have implemented
    strategies and invested significantly in their science and
    technology capacity. As a result, they are now retaining and
    attracting talent that once came to the United States to study,
    conduct research, and build companies here. Those are just a
    few of the indicators that should serve as a warning to all of
    us that we are losing ground.
        The economic and national security risk of loss of
    leadership are particularly high in some science and technology
    fields. If we do not lead, we will be poorly positioned to help
    set global norms and standards for the responsible development
    and application of emerging technologies such as artificial
    intelligence (AI) and biotechnology. Even when our best efforts
    to set norms are not enough, science and technology (S&T)
    leadership will enable us to develop strong defensive
    capabilities to protect the American people against those who
    wish us harm.
        I do not want to cause any confusion about where I stand. I
    remain as firmly committed as ever to our investments across
    all fields of science and engineering, as well as the
    humanities. Those who study ethics and philosophy and other
    aspects of human society will be needed alongside those who
    study bytes and microbes. Without this scholarly partnership,
    the United States will not have the tools to lead responsibly
    at home or abroad.
        The other partnership that remains essential is that
    between the public and private sectors. The private sector has
    been increasing its investments in research and development
    even as the public sector has fallen back. However, the
    objectives and the constraints are very different for each
    sector. Joined together in effective partnership, on the other
    hand, the two sectors can leverage each other's strengths and
    resources to advance shared goals.
        Our Nation has accomplished great things when we have put
    our minds to it. We sent a man to the moon, invented GPS and
    the internet, and developed the entire field of synthetic
    biology. We have what it takes to lead. The question is, will
    we do what it takes?
        As we embark on another busy year in this Committee, I look
    forward to today's testimony and discussion that will help us
    frame both the challenges and opportunities ahead for American
    leadership in science and technology.
        [The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]

        Good morning and welcome to this hearing on United States
    Competitiveness in Critical Technologies. And welcome to our
    distinguished panel of witnesses.
        United States leadership in science and technology has long
    given U.S. companies a competitive advantage, which in turn has
    led to job creation and an increased standard of living for all
    Americans. It has also bolstered our national defense. However,
    as recent reports have underscored, the United States has
    already begun to face the consequences of our inability to make
    strategic and sustained long-term investments in our science
    and technology enterprise. For too long we have coasted on the
    vision and political will that our leaders had in the 1950s,
    when they enacted the National Defense Education Act and other
    seminal laws that invested in our nation's talent and built the
    foundations for U.S. leadership in science and technology.
        We have risen to the challenge a few times since then, for
    example in the doubling of the NIH budget and the initiatives
    in the America COMPETES Act, including the creation of ARPA-E.
    However, in the last 15 years, the nondefense research and
    development budget has stagnated. We have been lamenting our
    domestic STEM pipeline challenge for decades, yet we have not
    made much progress. In the meantime, other countries have
    implemented strategies and invested significantly in their
    science and technology capacity. As a result, they are now
    retaining and attracting talent that once came to the United
    States to study, conduct research, and build companies here.
    Those are just a few of the indicators that should serve as a
    warning to all of us that we are losing ground.
        The economic and national security risks of loss of
    leadership are particularly high in some science and technology
    fields. If we do not lead, we will be poorly positioned to help
    set global norms and standards for the responsible development
    and application of emerging technologies such as artificial
    intelligence and biotechnology. Even when our best efforts to
    set norms are not enough, science and technology leadership
    will enable us to develop strong defensive capabilities to
    protect the American people against those who wish us harm.
        I do not want to cause any confusion about where I stand. I
    remain as firmly committed as ever to our investments across
    all fields of science and engineering as well as the
    humanities. Those who study ethics and philosophy and other
    aspects of human society will be needed alongside those who
    study bytes and microbes. Without this scholarly partnership,
    the United States will not have the tools to lead responsibly
    at home or abroad.
        The other partnership that remains essential is that
    between the public and private sectors. The private sector has
    been increasing its investments in research and development
    even as the public sector has fallen back. However, the
    objectives and the constraints are very different for each
    sector. Joined together in effective partnership, on the other
    hand, the two sectors can leverage each other's strengths and
    resources to advance shared goals.
        Our nation has accomplished great things when we have put
    our minds to it. We sent a man to the moon, invented GPS and
    the internet, and developed the entire field of synthetic
    biology. We have what it takes to lead. The question is, will
    we do what it takes?
        As we embark on another busy year in this Committee, I look
    forward to today's testimony and discussion that will help us
    frame both the challenges and opportunities ahead for American
    leadership in science and technology.

        Chairwoman Johnson. I now recognize Mr. Lucas, our Ranking
    Member, for his opening statement.
        Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for holding this
    important hearing on U.S. competitiveness in critical
    technologies.
        American superiority in science and technology is
    fundamental to our economic competitiveness, our national
    security, and our way of life. But the U.S. is facing two
    fundamental challenges to our competitiveness and growth as a
    Nation. First, foreign countries, especially China, are
    threatening to outpace us in scientific research and
    development. Second, we must respond to the changing climate
    and develop next-generation technologies to understand it,
    address it, and mitigate it.
        To meet these two generational challenges, we must
    accelerate our investments in basic research, as well as invest
    in the tools and infrastructure needed to support that
    research. That's why yesterday I introduced the Securing
    American Leadership in Science and Technology Act. I'm proud to
    be joined by many of my Republican colleagues on the Science
    Committee on this bill, which creates a long-term strategy for
    growing our Nation's investment in basic research and research
    infrastructure, while cutting red tape to improve taxpayers'
    returns on investment.
        The bill directs the development of a National Science and
    Technology Strategy for the United States and a quadrennial
    review process. This will provide a more strategic, whole-of-
    government effort for setting national priorities and improving
    coordination between Federal agencies.
        The bill prioritizes investment in Federal basic research.
    It authorizes a doubling of basic research funding over the
    next 10 years at the Department of Energy (DOE), the National
    Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards
    and Technology (NIST), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
    Administration (NOAA).
        The bill also prioritizes research infrastructure, from
    light sources to supercomputers. If we want to do big things
    and compete for the best scientists and companies in the world
    to work here in the U.S., we need world-class facilities.
        The bill promotes the development of an American STEM-
    capable workforce. To support the industries of the future, we
    need workers with STEM skills at all levels, from the skilled
    technical workforce to the Ph.D.-level scientists.
        Finally, the bill includes regulatory reform to improve the
    effectiveness of taxpayer investments in R&D. The bill updates
    technology transfer laws to get research out of the lab and
    into the private industry for development, and makes it easier
    for private industry to collaborate with the Federal Government
    on research.
        I recognize that we are the minority party and that we do
    not get to set the agenda. But I believe we have many shared
    priorities. I believe this legislative package will start a
    bipartisan conversation about what we need to do to ensure
    America's lead in the technological revolution of the 21st
    Century.
        China has made it an explicit goal to surpass the U.S. in
    critical technologies. Their ``Made in China 2025'' initiative
    is a bold plan, which outlines their intent to become global
    leaders in areas like quantum information science, advanced
    robotics, aerospace, and biotechnology. China is making real
    investments in R&D, increasing government-funded R&D by 56
    percent between 2011 and 2016.
        At the same time, U.S. investment in basic civilian
    research has stagnated, falling by 12 percent in absolute
    terms. As we will hear today, there are indications that China
    may have already surpassed the U.S. in total research
    investment this year. China is also pushing a strategy of
    promoting foreign acquisitions, forced technology transfer
    agreements, and, in many cases, commercial cyber-espionage to
    gain cutting-edge technologies and know-how.
        We must protect our Nation's research and intellectual
    property. The Trump Administration has taken good steps toward
    protecting American IP (intellectual property) from Chinese
    aggression. But we must do more to protect sensitive American
    research, while maintaining the spirit of open science that has
    fueled generations of discoveries.
        As any good football coach will tell you, the best defense
    is a good offense. American industry is the driver of
    investment in R&D spending in this country, accounting for 70
    percent of U.S. R&D. But those investments are fueled by the
    ideas that come out of government-funded basic research, the
    type of research that industry doesn't undertake because it's
    too risky and it's too early-stage. Since World War II, the
    successful partnership between government, academia and
    industry, has made our research enterprise the envy of the
    world. It's time to renew that enterprise.
        Americans are pioneers, and this spirit has always driven
    our support for science. But I believe we need to collectively
    do a better job of providing a vision for why science matters
    to all Americans. I look forward to hearing from our
    distinguished panel of witnesses about how we can work together
    to meet this challenge and ensure America continues to lead in
    science and technology.
        And with that, I yield back, Madam Chair.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:]

        Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson for holding this important
    hearing on U.S. Competitiveness in Critical Technologies.
        American superiority in science and technology is
    foundational to our economic competitiveness, our national
    security, and our way of life. But the U.S. is facing two
    fundamental challenges to our competitiveness and growth as a
    nation.
        First, foreign countries, especially China, are threatening
    to outpace us in scientific research and development. Second,
    we must respond to a changing climate and develop next-
    generation technologies to understand it, address it, and
    mitigate it.
        To meet these two generational challenges, we must
    accelerate our investments in basic research, as well as invest
    in the tools and infrastructure needed to support that
    research. That's why yesterday I introduced the Securing
    American Leadership in Science and Technology Act.
        I'm proud to be joined by many of my Republican colleagues
    on the Science Committee on this bill, which creates a long-
    term strategy for growing our nation's investment in basic
    research and research infrastructure, while cutting red tape to
    improve the taxpayers' return on investment. The bill directs
    the development of a National Science and Technology Strategy
    for the United States and a quadrennial review process. This
    will provide a more strategic, whole-of government effort, for
    setting national priorities and improving coordination between
    federal agencies.
        The bill prioritizes investment in federal basic research.
    It authorizes a doubling of basic research funding over the
    next 10 years at the Department of Energy, the National Science
    Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
    and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The
    bill also prioritizes research infrastructure. From light
    sources, to supercomputers--if we want to do big things and
    compete for the best scientists and companies in the world to
    work here in the U.S., we need world-class facilities.
        The bill promotes the development of an American STEM-
    capable workforce. To support the industries of the future, we
    need workers with STEM skills at all levels--from the skilled
    technical workforce to Ph.D. level scientists.
        Finally, the bill includes regulatory reform to improve the
    effectiveness of taxpayer investments in R&D. The bill updates
    technology transfer laws to get research out of the lab and
    into private industry for development, and makes it easier for
    private industry to collaborate with the federal government on
    research.
        I recognize that we are the minority party and that we do
    not get to set the agenda. But I believe we have many shared
    priorities and I hope this legislative package will start a
    bipartisan conversation about what we need to do to ensure
    America lead's the technological revolution of the 21st
    Century.
        China has made it an explicit goal to surpass the U.S. in
    critical technologies. Their ``Made in China 2025'' initiative
    is a bold plan, which outlines their intent to become the
    global leader in areas like quantum information science,
    advanced robotics, aerospace and biotechnology. China is making
    real investments in R&D-increasing government-funded R&D by 56
    percent between 2011 and 2016. At the same time, U.S.
    investment in basic civilian research has stagnated, falling by
    12 percent in absolute terms. As we will hear today, there are
    indications that China may have already surpassed the U.S.
    total research investment this year. China is also pushing a
    strategy of promoting foreign acquisitions, forced technology
    transfer agreements, and, in many cases, commercial cyber-
    espionage to gain cutting-edge technologies and know-how.
        We must protect our nation's research and intellectual
    property. The Trump Administration has taken good steps towards
    protecting American IP from Chinese aggression. But we must do
    more to protect sensitive American research, while maintaining
    the spirit of open science that has fueled generations of
    discoveries. As any good football coach will tell you, the best
    defense is a good offense.
        American industry is the driver of investment in R&D
    spending in our country, accounting for 70% of U.S. R&D. But
    those investments are fueled by the ideas that come out of
    government-funded basic research, the type of research that
    industry doesn't undertake because it's too risky and too
    early-stage. Since World War II, the successful partnership
    between government, academia and industry, has made our
    research enterprise the envy of the world. It's time to renew
    that enterprise.
        Americans are pioneers and this spirit has always driven
    our support for science. But I believe we need to collectively
    do a better job of providing a vision for why science matters
    to all Americans. I look forward to hearing from our
    distinguished panel of witnesses about how we can work together
    to meet this challenge and ensure America continues to lead in
    science and technology.

        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Lucas.
        At this time I'd like to introduce our witnesses. Our first
    witness is Dr. Diane Souvaine. Dr. Souvaine is currently
    serving as Chair of the National Science Board (NSB), a
    position she has held since 2018. From 2016 to 2018 she served
    as Vice Chair. She was first appointed to the Board in 2008 and
    reappointed in 2014. She's also a Professor of computer science
    and Adjunct Professor of mathematics at Tufts University, where
    she has been a member of the faculty since 1998. During her
    tenure at Tufts, she has served in several leadership
    positions, including Vice Provost for Research, Senior Advisor
    to the Provost, and Chair of the Department of Computer
    Science.
        Our next witness is Dr. Eric Schmidt. Dr. Schmidt is the
    founder of Schmidt Futures and also Technical Advisor to
    Alphabet Inc., where he advises leaders on technology,
    business, and policy issues. Previously, he was Executive
    Chairman of Alphabet from 2015 to 2018 and of Google from 2011
    to 2015, where he also served as CEO from 2001 to 2011. Dr.
    Schmidt became Chairman of the Department of Defense's (DOD's)
    Innovation Board in 2016 and was awarded the Department of
    Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service in 2017. He is
    also Chairman of the U.S. National Security Commission on
    Artificial Intelligence and was a member of the President's
    Council of Advisors on Science from 2009 to 2017.
        Our third witness is Dr. Chaouki Abdallah. Dr. Abdallah is
    Executive Vice President for Research at the Georgia Institute
    of Technology, that is Georgia Tech, a position he has held
    since 2018. In this position he provides overall leadership for
    the research, economic development, and related support units
    within Georgia Tech and serves on the President's Executive
    Leadership Team. Dr. Abdallah also serves on the Executive
    Committee for the Association of Public and Land Grant
    Universities and the Government-University-Industry Research
    Roundtable. Prior to his position at Georgia Tech, he spent his
    career at the University of New Mexico, including as Chair of
    the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Provost,
    and then briefly as President from January 2017 to February
    2018.
        As our witnesses should know, each of you will have 5
    minutes for your spoken testimony. Your written testimony will
    be included in the record for the hearing. When all of you have
    completed your spoken testimony, we will begin questions with
    each member having 5 minutes to question the panel. And so we
    will start now with our first witness Dr. Souvaine.

                    TESTIMONY OF DR. DIANE SOUVAINE,

                      CHAIR, NATIONAL SCIENCE BOARD

        Dr. Souvaine. Thank you. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member
    Lucas, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the
    opportunity to speak with you today as Chair of the National
    Science Board.
        For 70 years, science and engineering have driven our
    economic growth, underpinned our national security, and
    transformed nearly every aspect of our lives. This was no
    accident. Congress' sustained bipartisan commitment to basic
    research has played a key role in creating a knowledge
    ecosystem in which academia, government, and the private sector
    partner to drive innovation.
        Science and Engineering Indicators 2020, which the Board
    released 2 weeks ago, shows that S&E (science and engineering)
    is now truly a worldwide enterprise, connected, complex, and
    interdependent with more players and opportunities and
    humanity's collective knowledge growing exponentially. While
    science is the endless frontier, we're not the only explorers.
    Staying at the forefront of S&E is essential for our economy
    and our security. As other countries have invested in their own
    research enterprises, our share of global discovery and
    innovation has declined and will likely continue to decline. We
    are no longer the uncontested leader in S&E, and we must adapt
    to changes in the world and in our country.
        In my written testimony I described the growth of S&E
    investments around the world and the accompanying increase in
    international competition and collaboration. I also talk about
    the importance of foreign talent and the urgent need to build
    and diversify our domestic STEM workforce. I also suggest that
    we must recognize that the private sector now funds more
    fundamental R&D than the Federal Government does, and it is key
    to our S&E ecosystem's response to rising competition.
        In thinking about our strategy, I would highlight two
    areas. First, we need to compete with both intangibles and
    money. In recent years, both the private sector and Congress
    have responded to our peers worldwide with increased
    investment, including NSF. And for our part we're grateful to
    Congress for their wisdom. Only the Federal Government can make
    strategic long-term commitments to creating the new knowledge
    that is the seed corn for the entire U.S. S&E enterprise.
        Despite these increases, the Board believes that China has
    already surpassed us in R&D investments. And relatively slow
    increases in public investment has a cost. Between 2000 and
    2017, while global R&D investments tripled, NSF's funding rate
    fell from 33 percent to 21 percent, leaving billions in
    outstanding merit-reviewed ideas unfunded.
        AI and quantum computing are now critical technologies in
    part because NSF supported early-stage research years ago. As
    NSF looks to the next big thing, are we already leaving another
    Google, LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
    Observatory), or Kevlar on the cutting room floor? As you
    consider legislation, I encourage you to ask, what do our
    agencies need to accomplish their missions, and what does our
    country need to retain preeminence in S&E?
        Second, to produce results, R&D investments must be coupled
    with a highly skilled STEM-capable workforce from skilled
    technical workers to PhDs. We must move aggressively to grow
    and diversify our domestic STEM workforce. At the same time we
    must acknowledge our near-term reliance on foreign-born talent.
    This dependence is particularly acute in computer science,
    math, and engineering--fields that are vital to many critical
    technologies.
        Amid a new global bidding war for S&E talent, we must
    welcome international students and workers. We need to also
    make our S&E enterprise a magnet for curious creative Americans
    from all backgrounds and from every State who want to explore,
    solve problems, and make the world a better place. We must
    build a more inclusive S&E ecosystem, upgrade K-12 STEM
    education, and ensure robust pathways into S&E jobs. We must
    remember that education is a public good and that public
    universities and colleges have a special role to play in
    bringing the innovation economy to every State. Our message
    must be unified and clear: STEM is for all Americans. Just as
    illiteracy cannot be considered a virtue, it can no longer be
    socially acceptable to be bad at math.
        To conclude, this is our ask: Be fearless. Let's not merely
    react to anxieties from global competition, concern about
    security threats, or angst about constrained budgets. Instead,
    let's act now before lagging indicators show that it's too
    late.
        Let's recommit to the partnerships among government,
    universities, and the private sector that have driven our
    success, embracing the obligation to turn our Nation's lead in
    basic research into innovations.
        Let's embrace America's identity as the land of opportunity
    and remember the can-do attitude that defines our people.
        Let's unleash the strength of our values: A spirit of
    exploration, of wonder, of discovery, coupled with a
    willingness to take risks and an emphasis on freedom and
    individual creativity to ensure America's continued preeminence
    in research and innovation in the 21st century. Because the
    best way to lead the future is to invent it.
        I thank you for your time and look forward to your
    questions.
        [The prepared statement of Dr. Souvaine follows:]

    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Schmidt.

                     TESTIMONY OF DR. ERIC SCHMIDT,

                        FOUNDER, SCHMIDT FUTURES

        Dr. Schmidt. Thank you very much. I completely agree with
    Dr. Souvaine and also to your two initial statements,
    Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and thank you for
    letting me be here.
        When I was a graduate student, I was funded by National
    Science funding as well as DARPA funding. Without that funding,
    I would not have been able to do the kind of research that at
    the time allowed my career to become what it is today.
        During that time, I was CEO of Google and I'm now the
    Chairman of two essentially national security or DOD
    commissions. Larry and Sergey, when they worked at Stanford,
    were funded by National Science Foundation grants. There were
    plenty of examples where government initial basic research
    funding in key areas that were thought to be promising created
    enormous wealth for our Nation and made it globally
    competitive. I can give you example after example, as you
    pointed out.
        My message today is one of urgency. Business as usual seems
    awfully pleasant and fine, but it's not going to deal with the
    challenges that we face from a standpoint of global leadership
    and national security. As an example, China is clearly and
    aggressively trying to close the lead that we have between them
    and emerging technologies. In a most recent public announcement
    they said that they wished to lead and in fact surpass the
    United States in the following areas: Quantum communications,
    supercomputing, aerospace, 5G, mobile payments, new energy
    vehicles, high-speed rail, financial technology, and AI, which
    is everything I do, right, and everything everybody here really
    cares about. These guys are smart, and they know what they're
    going to focus on.
        Now, we have studied this pretty carefully, and at the
    moment we are ahead in AI. We're ahead by some number of months
    or years, and the number is not large. There's every evidence
    that our current lead is very, very fragile and that China will
    catch up and perhaps surpass for the reasons that Dr. Souvaine
    already talked about. Some of the numbers, there are about 15
    times as many deployed 5G base stations in China as in the
    United States. Chinese researchers are expected to overtake
    Americans in the 1 percent of the most cited scientific papers
    in AI. By 2030 China is expected to in actual terms be larger
    than the U.S. in terms of R&D.
        So this competition with China is not zero-sum. A
    simplistic model would be to decouple, and that would be very
    damaging to America for the reasons that have already been
    outlined. And yet we need to recalibrate this. Espionage and
    intellectual property thefts, everyone here is aware of these
    things. We have to address those. Our model, which is a model
    of free and open society with people coming in, new ideas, and
    so forth, should be the model that wins, but it's under
    challenge today.
        As the Ranking Member said, the best defense is a good
    offense. I simply want America to win, and I think we all agree
    on that. So what is it going to take? How do we win in this
    incredible competition that's going to play out in the next
    decade? I have six proposals, which are just real quick.
        The first is we're going to need to take the core R&D
    funding and double it, as you already discussed in your
    statement. And we're probably going to have to double it again
    after that, but let's start by the first doubling. Let's grow
    this, let's invest in it. We really, really need that as a
    Nation. There are plenty of very, very good targets for this
    that will help the country in all sorts of ways.
        Second, in infrastructure--I'll just be blunt, we need an
    alternative to Huawei. We need a U.S. alternative that we're
    proud of and that works and so forth and so on, including
    spectrum sharing with the DOD, et cetera. With grants, and the
    way they work, we've been studying--and I've been looking at
    the NIH model. They have a pretty good model. They do multiyear
    investments in promising individuals, and let them sort of
    begin to build these new patterns of thought and build the
    ultimate institutions that lead our Nation.
        With respect to partnerships, there are so many examples
    where the government and industry and universities can work
    better. I'll give you an example. I think there's a huge
    problem with lack of cloud resources, cloud computing
    resources, so there are various proposals from your
    organization and others which are around national research
    clouds, access to the computing power that's needed to get
    these powerful algorithms to really bring them to their top
    ability.
        In talent, we've spent lots of time in the last few years
    talking to the government about AI, and the core problem, to be
    very, very blunt, is that the knowledge about AI is so
    specialized and very, very few of those people are in
    government. We need a path, a plan, and an approach that will
    get that talent into the government one way or the other--
    training, hiring, mergers, partnerships, you name it.
        And then finally--and this is something which is not talked
    enough about--is that the Chinese have great confidence in AI.
    Seventy percent think it will make their country better. When
    you ask the same question to Americans, only 25 percent. We've
    got to address this. We've got to address concerns of which
    there's a long list: Privacy rules, investing in security,
    technical standards, avoiding algorithmic bias, preparing for
    the workforce impacts, which will eventually come from these
    technologies a long time from now. All of these things we have
    to address.
        So my point here is let's get ourselves onto a more urgent
    footing. This is going to be a big fight. It's going to be
    important. It's crucial to our national security, and it's
    important for our Nation and our Nation's identity, innovation,
    and, frankly, our economic growth. Thank you very much.
        [The prepared statement of Dr. Schmidt follows:]

    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Abdallah.

                   TESTIMONY OF DR. CHAOUKI ABDALLAH,

                 EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH,

                    GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

        Dr. Abdallah. Good morning, Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking
    Member Lucas, and Members of the Committee. Thank you for
    inviting me to address the topic of U.S. competitiveness with
    the focus on critical technologies and their economic and
    security implications from the vantage point of a research
    university.
        As you heard, I'm Chaouki Abdallah. I'm the Executive Vice
    President for Research at Georgia Tech, a leading public
    research university. We are a community of more than 9,000
    faculty, researchers, and staff, and we're incredibly proud to
    be serving about 36,000 of the brightest students from around
    the world. Within that community is also the Georgia Tech
    Research Institute, GTRI, an Army-university-affiliated
    research center.
        Like other universities, we benefited from Federal
    investments in research, and we contribute to the knowledge,
    creation, and economic activities. And until recently, as you
    just heard, most observers would have agreed with the
    assessments that, thanks to the national research strategy set
    more than 7o years ago, that the U.S. was indeed the undisputed
    leader in science and technology funding and in applications.
        The mission alignment and cooperation of three actors: The
    Federal Government, higher education institutions, and the
    private sector--have historically made the U.S. research
    landscape the most productive and admired in the world. But
    with that we attracted collaborators but also we became a
    target to competitors and foes who have sought to exploit the
    fruits of our research.
        And today, as you read in the National Science Board's
    recent report, ``The State of U.S. Science and Engineering
    2020,'' increasingly, the United States is seen globally as an
    important leader rather than the uncontested leader. And this
    is especially true in some of the critical technologies that
    we're addressing or discussing today.
        As detailed in my written testimony in a recent think-tank
    report, the risk of falling behind in critical areas and others
    pose an immediate national security risk and also a long-term
    economic risk. Achieving quantum supremacy, for example, will
    affect our current encryption systems. And materials that may
    be designed using machine learning algorithms are needed to
    achieve hypersonic flight.
        I do believe that the economic impact will manifest itself
    in the following way: Our ability to create new knowledge and
    industries will be diminished, thus impacting our economic
    health and competitiveness; reducing our ability to attract the
    best and the brightest and leading to further weakening of our
    national security and economic health.
        It is notable that the Office of Science and Technology
    Policy, the OSTP, through the Joint Committee on Research
    Environment, has initiated various initiatives to address
    urgent challenges facing research competitiveness.
    Organizations such as the AAU (Association of American
    Universities) and the APLU (Association of Public and Land-
    grant Universities) have commented on such initiatives, and I
    agree that the research universities will play an increasingly
    critical role in preparing, recruiting, and educating a diverse
    pool of STEM talent but also in maintaining our collaborative
    efforts with our allies and producing knowledge that will
    improve the human conditions, all while supporting the national
    and economic security of the Nation.
        Through your efforts and in collaboration with higher
    education institutions and the private sector, we will
    modernize the research model that served us so well and has led
    to STEM sector generating more than $2 trillion in taxes per
    year, as well as supporting more than 2/3 of the U.S. jobs.
        In the face of the competitive challenges from other
    nations, as you heard, and the complex global problems the
    Federal Government has an even larger role to play in funding
    and guiding long-term research, while harmonizing many of the
    conflicting reporting and compliance requirements. It is also
    incumbent upon American universities to continue to strengthen
    their collaboration with the Federal agencies and government
    and with industry and to assume more responsibility outside of
    our traditional roles. Universities must become ready for the
    students they admit, as well as to admit college-ready students
    while scaling up the basic and applied research activities that
    made many of them economic engines. They must also continue to
    collaborate while protecting sensitive data and research.
        One of the best opportunities and most enduring strategies
    for improving our S&T position is obviously to nurture and
    engage a larger number from untapped domestic populations and
    to provide an academic environment for them to strive and
    succeed as students, faculty, and researchers. My colleague,
    the Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, remarks
    that it's one thing to be in front of someone and not be seen
    but quite another to not be in front of someone and to never
    have your absence noticed. The absence of large portions of our
    citizens within the S&T enterprise is definitely being noticed
    and felt. Research universities are committed to working
    closely with the Federal Government and the private sector to
    produce S&T workforce that is more reflective of our society.
        I thank you again for the invitation to speak with you and
    look forward to your questions.
        [The prepared statement of Dr. Abdallah follows:]

    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. That completes the
    testimony of our witnesses. And now we will go to the
    questions. I yield myself 5 minutes.
        Dr. Souvaine, I will begin with you. The National Science
    Foundation is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. It is
    the only agency in our Federal Government dedicated to funding
    fundamental academic research across all fields of science and
    engineering, and the return on this investment over the last 70
    years has been immeasurable.
        However, the world has also changed in this time, and some
    policymakers and thought leaders are recommending that the NSF
    mission be broadened to include a deliberate focus on critical
    technologies. This might include, for example, creating a new
    directorate at NSF with its own dedicated budget line and more
    flexible DARPA-like authorities. How might such a directorate
    help advance U.S. competitiveness and critical technologies
    above and beyond the efforts already underway in the Federal
    Government? And how might we see it as a natural evolution of
    NSF's recent experiences such as convergence accelerators? And
    what steps would we need to take to ensure we continue to
    protect the essential basic research mission of NSF? Are there
    any potential concerns we should be looking out for?
        Dr. Souvaine. Thank you, Chair Johnson. I think NSF has
    already begun the evolution toward trying to guarantee that the
    outstanding results that come from the basic research and the
    applied basic research at the Foundation move fluidly into
    translation and into having impact. So currently within each of
    the directorates there are activities underway that try to move
    things forward. Then if you look at underneath the leadership
    of Director France Cordova, the work on the convergence
    accelerators or the big ideas or if you look at I-Corps or you
    look at various different initiatives, NSF has been evolving
    already.
        At the moment, as Dr. Schmidt has pointed out, though,
    things are urgent and we need to move faster still. We can't
    afford to leave our great innovations on the table and not pick
    up quickly. And suddenly that comes out of our S&E Indicators
    report from 2 weeks ago where we can show that in the U.S. we
    still fund more basic research than any other single entity,
    but others are funding more experimental research and are
    moving things forward more quickly. So we need to move things
    forward very quickly.
        Certainly if we were to have a directorate focused on
    accelerating these new critical technologies, this would be a
    smart change and would help this process, but it can't be a
    choice between investing in what we need now and what we need
    in the future. So we're going to need both. A new directorate
    focused on critical technologies could not thrive without the
    basic research seed corn on which things like AI and quantum
    are built. So I'd hope that this kind of proposal would allow
    us to enhance the focus of all the other NSF directorates on
    the high-risk, high-reward, long-term basic research to
    discover and invent the critical technologies of tomorrow at
    the same time as we accelerate the critical technologies of
    today.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Dr. Schmidt?
        Dr. Schmidt. I agree, and I would say that not only--well,
    first place, all of my friends in academia spend most of their
    time saying things that are much worse now. It's much harder to
    get funding early in their careers, and there's a long list of
    complaints. Partly it's because there isn't enough money and
    partly because things like the new directorate would--don't
    exist yet and they would help a lot. So I'm strongly in favor
    of that.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Dr. Abdallah?
        Dr. Abdallah. I would also agree and I would suggest that
    it is really the two parallel tracks that we need to focus on.
    Just like Dr. Schmidt, I was funded by NSF. My own research was
    funded by NSF, and the work I was doing then was basic
    research, but it had a lot of applications later. You heard
    about Google. Google was--the original algorithm is actually
    very fundamental research that ended up creating a lot of
    economic activity, so I think we need to continue to do both.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. My time is about
    expired. Mr. Lucas.
        Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I address my
    questions to the entire panel.
        As I mentioned in my opening statement, having introduced
    legislation that would direct the development of a national
    science and technology strategy and quadrennial review like the
    process DOD undertakes for national security--and I know each
    of you touched on this, but expand for me if you would, please,
    just a little bit more about what you would like to see in a
    process of whole-government strategy for S&T and, as always,
    how that would benefit U.S. competitiveness, just whoever would
    like to take that.
        Dr. Souvaine. Could you repeat the question?
        Mr. Lucas. Basically expand on your comments about what you
    would like to see in a process for a whole-of-government
    strategy on S&T and of course how that would benefit U.S.
    competitiveness. Because I have to explain things back home to
    my constituents, too.
        Dr. Souvaine. So I think that the U.S. needs to compete
    with values, talent, partners, and research infrastructure. We
    need to nurture homegrown and foreign-born talent to build our
    STEM-capable workforce. We need to prepare our domestic
    students from every ZIP Code and every background to think
    creatively with the STEM concepts that touch every area of our
    lives. And we need to do a dramatically better job of preparing
    our domestic students.
        At the same time, while we're doing this, we're dependent
    on foreign talent. We would leave the door open for the best
    and brightest, especially in the critical areas of computer
    science and math and engineering. We need to invest in critical
    areas of basic and applied science while supporting public-
    sector partnerships and development. And we need to be a
    reliable global partner and collaborator. Not doing so makes us
    a risk of becoming a victim of technological surprise when
    discoveries happen someplace else.
        And sustaining our investment in fundamental research is a
    key competitive advantage, but we need to make sure that it
    leads to innovations and increase the efficiency of that
    process. That means fostering the partnerships between
    academia, industry, and government and explore ways to break
    down the barriers that are preventing the fruitful partnerships
    right now.
        And finally, we need to retain our foundational American
    values of freedom of inquiry, openness, transparency, authority
    based on merit, scientific integrity, and an appreciation for
    creative and unusual ideas and have an intentionality about
    where and how we make investments.
        Dr. Schmidt. The United States got to where we are because
    of a unique combination of government, academia, private-sector
    collaboration in the open community and culture that Dr.
    Souvaine just talked about. We need to strengthen those links
    between Federal agencies, the military, private-sector,
    academics in all sorts of ways, whether it's the FFRDCs
    (Federally Funded Research and Development Centers) that are
    used as part of the military process, other kinds of
    interesting funding that comes to the NSF, DARPA, and so forth
    and so on. So I think the general answer is more of what we're
    doing at a global scale.
        We have the talent. People want to come to our country.
    People are incredibly creative here, and we have a strong
    challenger in China, which runs under a different system that
    we don't like.
        Dr. Abdallah. I believe our model worked extremely well and
    continues to work well, but an alignment of the incentives and
    alignment in the policies, alignment in the reporting I think
    will actually benefit us at this stage. Sharing data, sharing
    research data is important, but we have different ways right
    now, different agencies, different policies, different
    reporting requirements. Something like that, improvement in
    that aspect will help tremendously.
        I think also encouraging the incentives to try to get the
    research out of the universities. Even the basic research that
    we do at the universities in many cases is leading to ideas
    that may not be today implementable or has economic impacts,
    but it will need support, you know, between the lab and getting
    a large company or an investor to go in there. Facilitating
    that or encouraging policies to do that I think would be
    extremely important.
        Most importantly, I think investing in infrastructure I
    think is key, and in many cases some of the startups that we
    have in Atlanta, for example, they cannot afford to have the
    facilities that we may have at the universities, but also those
    facilities sometimes are not equipped to handle the requests
    from these companies.
        Mr. Lucas. As you heard me say in my opening comments, I am
    a supporter of doubling the money that we spend on federally
    funded basic research in the next decade. Part of the challenge
    that we have here in Congress is not only convincing the
    majority of each other of the importance of this but convincing
    those American taxpayers back home that this is fundamentally
    in their best interest. So thank you for being here today to
    help make that case.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. I love your
    statement. Mr. Bera.
        Mr. Bera. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. You know, we talk
    about the competition between America and China and the rest of
    the world. We do have some natural advantages that, you know, I
    think Dr. Schmidt, as you said, we are a free and open society.
    We are a society that's based on the rule of law. And, you
    know, you travel anywhere in this world, people still want to
    come to America. And there are some simple things that we could
    do through policy that actually give us a competitive advantage
    that we have done in the past.
        If I think about my own family's story, my parents
    immigrated in the 1950s from India to go to college at USC to
    get their graduate degree. And they were lucky enough to get a
    visa to stay in this country. And, you know, Dr. Abdallah, you
    talked about the number of students that are coming here,
    getting their college training, getting their graduate degrees
    and their Ph.D.s, yet a lot of those students are having a
    difficult time staying in the United States. And these are the
    next generation of entrepreneurs. That is something that is
    eminently within the possibility of this body to fix, to allow
    those folks to start their companies here, to stay here.
        You know, I don't remember the exact percentage, but a
    large number of the entrepreneurs and the startups are started
    by immigrants. It is good for our economy. It creates a ton of
    jobs. That was one of your six points, Dr. Schmidt as well and,
    you know, invest in that talent and allow them to stay here.
        I absolutely agree with the Ranking Member. We do have to
    double our investment in R&D. You know, I'm not smart enough to
    be an engineer, I went to medical school. But a lot of the
    Ph.D.s that I trained with, you know, that was a talent pool.
    But I talk to those Ph.D. students today. You know, many of
    them were going to stay in academia. A lot of them now are
    going to get their training and go out and join the private
    sector. That's not a bad thing, and maybe this is a question
    for Dr. Schmidt.
        When academia has unique talents and resources, how do we
    do technology transfer a little bit better? How do we allow the
    private sector to partner with the academic sector? Because
    there's also resources that the private sector can do. And, you
    know, I think there's some technical changes that we could do
    through policy through perhaps the tax code to make it a little
    bit easier for the private sector to partner with research and
    academia.
        And maybe, Dr. Abdallah, you could talk about some of what
    Georgia Tech is doing in that space.
        Dr. Schmidt. So half of the Silicon Valley startups are
    started by immigrants. And so everything you said is correct in
    the economic terms. The state-of-the-art is for technology
    companies to work very closely with universities, literally
    seamlessly. Much of this was done in the biology space where
    they created joint ventures and so forth, and they actually
    control the IP. But pretty much everybody's figured out that
    you want to be next to a leading university. You want the
    students going back and forth. And you want as a company, you
    want to give that university money in the appropriate ways
    because the university doesn't have enough money from its other
    sources. And I think that's a sustainable model.
        Mr. Bera. Dr. Abdallah, and maybe some examples with
    Georgia Tech?
        Dr. Abdallah. Yes. Thank you for that question. Actually,
    as you heard, in my capacity as VPR I'm also responsible for
    the economic development and the innovation. We have a lot of
    activities with the companies, both large companies who created
    innovation centers on campus, as well as opportunities for
    small companies and startup to start either from within Georgia
    Tech or from anywhere to be supported there. So we have
    programs and activities in that space.
        I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind and to
    help us with. One is companies, as you just heard from Dr.
    Schmidt, they want to be close to research universities or to
    universities both because of the talent pool, as well as to get
    the IP and the results of the funding or the research that
    comes out of those. But that transfer being close, you know,
    physically located or co-located with other companies and other
    entities that are engaged maybe sometimes competitively in the
    same businesses is very good.
        There's one aspect that I think we can maybe work toward
    that we're discussing at Georgia Tech and other places. In
    areas such as AI, you know, universities cannot afford to pay
    what Wall Street and what the top technological companies are
    offering, so--and in many cases we have faculty members who
    will leave, take a leave of absence to go to some of these
    companies and, you know, ask for 1 year, which is fine, and
    then try to extend it. That puts the universities in a very,
    very awkward situation. We want them to stay, we want them to
    engage with the companies where, by the way, the companies have
    a lot of the data that is needed to do the research also. It's
    not simply the money. So models that will allow that
    relationship to be two ways versus basically for the companies
    to hire away from the universities and eating the seed corn of
    the future researchers would be very, very appreciated.
        Mr. Bera. Great. Thanks. My time's expired. I yield back.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Brooks.
        Mr. Brooks. Thank you, Madam Chair. My comments and
    questions are directed primarily at Dr. Schmidt, but if there
    is time remaining after he responds and, Dr. Souvaine or Dr.
    Abdallah, feel free to join in as you wish.
        I'm looking at Dr. Schmidt's written testimony, and I'm
    going to read some quotes from it. Quote, ``The United States
    now faces an economic and military competitor in China that is
    aggressively trying to close our lead in emerging
    technologies.'' Quote, ``China's well-documented espionage,
    intellectual property theft, and talent recruitment programs
    are disadvantaging our companies, our universities, and our
    military. The findings of a recent Senate investigation into
    China's methods to unfairly exploit United States taxpayer-
    funded research for its own benefit is a case in point.''
        Quote, ``My concern is that China tries to fulfill a vision
    of high-tech authoritarianism that governing model will appeal
    to other governments searching for a foundation on which to
    exercise their power.'' And when I think of that high-tech
    authoritarianism, I can't think--I can help think of George
    Orwell 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, and others. Then, Dr.
    Schmidt, you go on to add, ``We should not only compete with
    China but also work with them.''
        Now, as I think of all your comments put together--and I
    serve on the Armed Services Committee, and we have plenty of
    briefings, classified and unclassified. I can't go into the
    classified part, but the gist of it is that China seeks to
    manage America's decline. And so there is a significant long-
    term risk there. Certainly their military prowess is
    increasing. The challenges associated with their claims to the
    South China Sea are troubling for that region of the world.
        And to make matters even worse, the United States-Chinese
    trade deficit, China is the worst trading partner we have. Our
    trade deficit there is about 6 times worse as the second-worst
    country on the planet.
        So now to the questions. How do we protect United States'
    interests with respect to this technology? That's part of it.
    And can you share some examples, as much as you can in this
    open setting of where you think there are opportunities to
    cooperate that would benefit the United States and areas where
    we should not cooperate for economic and security reasons?
        Dr. Schmidt. So thank you for that. So you have to have a--
    the competition with China is going to be the defining
    competition for the next 10 or 20 years. And the peaceful rise
    of China is in our interest for obvious reasons. So it seems to
    me that we have to come with a language and a way of dealing
    with them.
        So the first is I would like us to agree that America
    should win, and winning is defined as defining the key
    technologies, inventing the future, driving the technology
    stack, and all that kind of stuff. To the degree that Chinese
    technology or technologists can enable us to win on our terms
    I'm OK with it but not unless it's consistent with that.
        So there are plenty of examples where you could imagine if
    Chinese technology were to dominate the globe with non-American
    values, it would really hurt us. The most obvious would be
    imagine if the internet were invented by China with a complete
    surveillance architecture? Just imagine if we inherited that
    from China, how different our experience as Americans would be
    today. So it's really important that we get these underlying
    technology platforms of which the internet is an example that
    we have so far won at, to be popular and be successful
    globally.
        One way to think about China is that they have solved the
    problem of identity, mobile phone, electronic payment, and
    surveillance in a single device. And my Chinese friends never
    use cash. But of course everything they do is tracked. And this
    is very un-American.
        Now, imagine if that structure becomes the standard
    structure in all of the BRI countries, the Belt and Road
    Initiative countries, of which there's roughly 63. That becomes
    a huge, huge problem for us. It's a market we can't sell into.
    It strengthens their leadership and so forth and so on. We
    don't have good answers as a country for this.
        Mr. Brooks. Dr. Abdallah or Dr. Souvaine, in the time that
    remains, would you all like to add any additional comment?
        Dr. Souvaine. I'd say briefly, certainly we need heightened
    vigilance as the information yesterday about the arrest of the
    prominent Harvard chemist suggests. Looking at conflict of
    commitment, conflict of interest, and we need partnerships
    between the Federal Government and the universities to do that.
        At the same time, as we think about competing with China,
    first of all, it's not just China but it's certainly a lot of
    it there. But we compete by being the best version of
    ourselves. We need to recognize and respect that China and
    other nations contribute to humanity's knowledge, and it's a
    good thing. We also know from the S&E 2020 report that our
    researchers across this country are publishing many more
    collaborative papers collaborating with international
    collaborators, and the single country that we collaborate with
    the most is also China.
        So we need to understand that that's important, but we need
    to be the best versions of ourselves. We need to promote
    openness while recognizing the balance between collaboration
    and security. We need to embrace competition, discovery,
    openness, fairness, immigration, international collaboration,
    curiosity-driven research, public education at all levels, our
    government-university-business ecosystem, but really do what
    Dr. Schmidt says. We need to be promoting our values because
    we're at the table. We're investing. We're part of every
    discussion, and we continue to promote our version of what it
    means to be honest, open, transparent, and successful.
        Mr. Brooks. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, witnesses.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Stevens.
        Ms. Stevens. Thank you so much, Madam Chair.
        And as Mr. Lucas referenced his disposition in this
    Congress, I'll say being in the majority and doing things on
    our terms certainly feels good, and so I will also second your
    comments, Dr. Schmidt, that as we look to the race of the
    future and winning the innovation future, the reason why it is
    so important for us to talk about it being on American terms is
    because then we set the stage. It is our jobs, it is our
    transparency, it is our technological might.
        But the headlines are also quite alarming over the last
    several years. In 2017, The Atlantic monthly, coming out of the
    President's budget proposal, had a headline that we are bracing
    for a lost generation in scientific advancement and research
    funding. As by comparison looking at our friends overseas, the
    U.K. just doubled their funding for R&D. South Korea has made a
    similar commitment, even our partners from the north without
    question.
        So what we're also talking about is sort of a dialog, a
    social dialog here in Congress and with our constituents back
    home. But most simply, you know, Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Abdallah,
    in terms of the work that you do, how much is your current work
    dependent on basic research funding from the United States
    Government?
        Dr. Abdallah. In my day job basically my job is to
    facilitate the work that everyone else is doing, so I would say
    at the university probably more than 80 percent is depending on
    the basic research, including things that are happening at
    GTRI, which is the applied research arm. But even in that sense
    we're depending on things that either were developed earlier or
    are being developed elsewhere.
        Ms. Stevens. And if that basic research funding, sir, was
    to dry up--not that that's what's being proposed--would there
    be any alternative?
        Dr. Abdallah. Not if the Federal Government is not priming
    the pump and funding that. I don't see any alternative, no.
        Ms. Stevens. And, Dr. Schmidt, I know you're not here in
    your previous capacity, but you referenced your work with
    Google. And if it's correct, Google now is one of the five--I
    guess it's Alphabet, right--but it's valued as one of the five
    most high-performing stocks by market cap. But you traced it
    back to basic research funding. Could that have happened
    without basic research funding?
        Dr. Schmidt. It would not have. And the core reason is that
    in the American system, the basic research is earlier than
    corporate research. So the basic research, which is largely
    government-funded with some philanthropy--and I'm personally
    trying to do that now--is the seed corn. And everything that
    has driven American competitiveness and American economics has
    fundamentally started from that 50 years ago. So your
    predecessors made these incredibly smart decisions 50 years ago
    starting with Vannevar Bush and the creation of the ecosystem
    that we have today post-World War II.
        And we seem to have forgotten how fundamental this is.
    Everyone thinks, oh, my God, you know, I invented this, I
    invented that. You're standing on the shoulders of giants who
    were originally funded. Virtually all of Silicon Valley was
    either DARPA-funded or National Science Foundation-funded or
    university-funded through that mechanism.
        Today, all of the leading technology companies are very
    integrated with their university counterparts. It's very
    symbiotic. Let's not screw that up.
        Ms. Stevens. Good point. And, Dr. Souvaine, just from your
    vantage, are you aware of any other modern industrialized
    nations that debate the merits of funding basic research in
    such a way that we have dared to do so here in the United
    States?
        Dr. Souvaine. No, I'm not exactly. I would have to look
    into that more carefully.
        Ms. Stevens. Great. Thank you.
        Dr. Souvaine. But I would just echo what Dr. Schmidt said.
    Certainly there are VC (venture capital) capital people who've
    come to talk to us on the board who talk about the fact that
    what they're commercializing today they know came from a pie-
    in-the-sky NSF grant 25 years ago. And they are very concerned
    that they are still going to have something to commercialize 25
    years from now.
        Dr. Schmidt. Can I just add that the Chinese are doing
    heavy, heavy government funding in basic research in order to
    catch up. And when I say heavy, we don't exactly know the
    number but it's a very, very large number.
        Ms. Stevens. Well, thank you. We'll remember all these
    points as we head into budget season. And with that, Madam
    Chair, I yield back the remainder of my time. Thank you.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Babin.
        Mr. Babin. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to
    the witnesses for being here as well. I appreciate it.
        It's critical that we continue to invest in our sciences to
    promote technological innovations here in America. Our
    investment and prioritization in this country, science and
    technology is a determining factor in our global
    competitiveness. But we must protect our information.
        We've even seen the infiltration of Chinese influence in
    our university systems as recently as a couple of days ago.
    Just yesterday, I read an article reporting the arrest of the
    Chairman of Harvard University's Chemistry Department, Dr.
    Charles Lieber, for lying about receiving millions of dollars
    from the Chinese possibly in exchange for cutting-research
    information. Also, a researcher at Boston University was
    charged as a Chinese agent and lying about it. It is a distinct
    problem.
        I've introduced a bill that will enable institutions of
    higher education to protect federally funded research from
    cyber theft and interference. It's called the Securing American
    Research from Cyber Theft Act, and it will provide a pilot
    project for a nationwide network of secure computing enclaves
    for federally funded research in universities.
        And with that being said, Dr. Abdallah, the FBI and
    intelligence agencies have warned Congress about the threat of
    foreign espionage of U.S. science and technology, particularly
    on university campuses. How can we best work with law
    enforcement to address this threat?
        Dr. Abdallah. Thank you for that question. Actually, the
    FBI and other U.S. law enforcement agencies have been proactive
    in discussing with universities, educating us sometimes on some
    of the things that were happening that either we were not aware
    of or entities that we were not concerned about at one time. So
    in the last couple of years I'll say there has been a much more
    collaborative effort, education from the law enforcement
    agencies. And in fact some of the news that you're seeing are a
    byproduct of the universities being much more aware and trying
    to figure out exactly what these conflicts of interest that
    used to be focused on only financial conflict of interest, what
    we can do about them.
        Some of the things that I think are happening from our side
    is we're educating our researchers a lot more about protecting
    sensitive information. I do want to say also in some of these
    areas it's not necessarily that piece of information, but that
    is information in connection with others. There are a lot of
    connections between some of these areas and so on.
        One thing that I think would be very helpful is to
    reestablish the National Security Higher Education Board. This,
    as you know, was a board of universities and the government to
    try to look at some of these concerns and try to set policies
    in place.
        Mr. Babin. All right. Thank you very much. And I think
    that's a great idea myself.
        Dr. Schmidt, I'm very concerned about moves that China is
    making on 5G wireless technology, particularly in trying to
    dominate the global market. I understand that the U.K. just
    recently chose Huawei for their 5G. What do we need to do to
    not just compete but to lead in the 5G race?
        Dr. Schmidt. There's a set of things we have to do. There's
    plenty of money, but there's no U.S. competitors at the scale
    that we need. So we need a good 5G solution at a sort of
    national level for hardware, and we also need something which
    the telcos don't have enough of, more good mid-band bandwidth.
    Today, they're working in a technology area called millimeter
    wave, which is very high performance but has some coverage
    issues. It's not as good as the mid-band, which everyone else
    is using.
        I have separately and as part of my military work argued
    that the DOD should share some of its key frequencies with the
    telcos in order to enable this. I believe that the United
    States needs a competitive 5G plan.
        Today, the reason these countries are purchasing Huawei is,
    one, it's cheaper than the competitors; and two, they're
    getting very cheap money out of China to do so. That then
    enables China to populate their networks with all of the
    Chinese principles. How is that OK with us?
        Mr. Babin. It's not OK. OK. Thank you very much. And also,
    China's investment and development and not on basic research
    implies that they're building their technological success on
    the basic research developed in the United States and around
    the world. What is the right balance for protecting U.S. basic
    research while continuing to promote an open-science system
    that has made our scientific enterprise the best in the world,
    Dr. Schmidt?
        Dr. Schmidt. First place, the stuff that you're describing
    where those are illegal activities, they need to be
    aggressively policed. Those are violations of our law and
    they're not OK. You can imagine a number of ways of
    strengthening those, more disclosures, things like that, things
    that you have talked about in your security bill.
        To me, the way we win is we run faster. We invent ahead. We
    benefit from the American model, and we just run faster. I
    think collectively yourselves and we believe that we can do
    that. We can win this, but it's a run-faster strategy.
        Mr. Babin. Thank you. And my time is expired. Dr. Souvaine,
    I had one for you, but I'll have to pass that till later. Thank
    you, Madam Chair.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Foster.
        Mr. Foster. Thank you. Doctors--over here, Bill Foster, the
    physicist and chip designer.
        I was fascinated by your comments on what can be called the
    unified Chinese solution to identity payments, communications,
    and surveillance. And this is something we're wrestling with on
    my other Committee, Financial Services, where I'm chairing a
    task force on AI that, among other things, is looking at
    identity and all the things there, also as part of a bipartisan
    push to get the Federal Reserve to consider issuing digital
    dollars, which of course deals with all those same issues.
        And so, first, do you believe there are technological
    solutions, you know, like, you know, FIDO or federated ID or
    privacy-preserving biometrics that would allow you actually to
    solve the problems of identity payments without the
    surveillance aspect of it?
        Dr. Schmidt. Technically, yes, for the reasons that you
    outlined. It's not clear to me that politically that would be
    acceptable in America. I'll let you guys decide that question.
    What China has done is it's made access to the internet to be
    tied to a national ID. There's no anonymous browsing in China.
    So once you eliminate anonymous browsing, you have a registered
    ID which you then tie with a face photo. At that point you can
    track the person not only digitally but also by cameras and so
    forth so you know physically where they are and you know what
    they're doing.
        The next thing they do is they have a common credit card
    that they all use, which is essentially government-controlled.
    And that common credit card, all that data goes into a central
    processor. So now we know what the person looks like, where
    they are, what they're surfing for, and what they're spending
    money on.
        Mr. Foster. Right. And we need some element of that to deal
    with money laundering and ransomware and the long list of
    things like that. The advantage we have is potentially that we
    may have a trusted court system that could keep government's
    hands off of that data, anyway, long discussion not for this
    Committee, but I'd be fascinated to engage with you separately
    on that.
        As you may or may not be aware, I'm the science guy, but I
    also started a company that makes most of the theater lighting
    equipment, and we've been on both sides of patent fights. And
    when we were engaged in patent fights, I felt at the time that
    there was a pretty good balance between the rights of patent
    holders and people that wanted to manufacture stuff. But it's
    my feeling that things have drifted in a direction where you're
    off-center, that the system integrators have now--of which you
    are, you know, involved with one of them, really got too
    powerful so that you have this doctrine of so-called efficient
    infringement.
        And it's a real problem because if you're going to
    manufacture a cell phone, you have to license or infringe upon
    1,000 patents or something like that. And so you have to have a
    patent system that deals with that properly. You can't let all
    1,000 people hold up your ability to manufacture a cell phone.
    But on the other hand, you know, there's a lot of feeling,
    including by me, that we've actually weakened the system too
    far.
        And now that you're no longer associated with a dominant
    system integrator, I was wondering if you would step back and
    if you think the needle is well-centered at this point? And I
    just want to put in before I let you speak for a moment that
    I'm one of the sponsors of the Stronger Patents Act of 2019,
    that's an effort to move the needle back in terms of increasing
    the power of patent holders over the system integrators.
        Dr. Schmidt. I'd have to look at it more specifically. This
    battle has been going on for a very long time, and it's an
    important issue of rights. My advice would be, let's focus on
    the prize, and the prize is American competitiveness competing
    against China in the technology areas that I've identified.
    Please don't do anything that would slow down our ability to
    innovate in these spaces. Do everything you can to cause more
    investment and more innovation.
        Mr. Foster. Right, but part of that is preserving the
    rights of the patent holder. If you come up with a good idea
    and then get no renumeration because someone stole it. I mean,
    you're aware of the situation with Huawei and Cisco, right?
        Dr. Schmidt. I am.
        Mr. Foster. You know, if China had a functional patent
    system and a court system, Huawei would be a wholly owned
    subsidiary of Cisco. You know, it really would be because of
    the intellectual property theft. But they didn't certainly at
    the time. And so, you know, we have to get this balance right
    to optimize investment. And it's a deep question. If you can
    have a look at the Stronger Patents Act of 2019 and see if you
    agree with its goals.
        Let's see. And, actually, Dr. Abdallah, do you have any
    comments on how the patent system is working from your point of
    view?
        Dr. Abdallah. From the university point of view, you know,
    we consider that as a byproduct of the Federal funds, meaning
    we don't expect to generate a lot of money out of it. You know,
    most people think that universities or these ideas coming out
    are making the universities rich. In fact, we support it, you
    know, more than we get out of it. So anything that would make
    it more efficient and beneficial for the ultimate goal I am
    very much in support of.
        Mr. Foster. All right. Thank you, and yield back.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Baird.
        Mr. Baird. Thank you, Madam Chair. And this question is
    going to go to all of you. And I appreciate your expertise and
    being here as a witness, but the Securing Leadership in Science
    and Technology Act, which I'm an original cosponsor, really
    prioritizes investing in pipelines for the American STEM
    workers. And that ranges, as you well know, from skilled
    technical workforce to cybersecurity professionals to Ph.D.s in
    areas of need like AI and quantum. And so as, a Ph.D., I
    understand the importance of research and particularly the
    STEM-related fields.
        So my question to you is, can you comment on the national
    and economic security risks of failing to develop a domestic
    STEM-capable workforce? Start with you, Dr. Souvaine.
        Dr. Souvaine. I think when we look at the S&E indicators
    that came out 2 weeks ago, we can see that if you look at
    overall the amount of dependence we have had and continue to
    have on foreign-born talent and yet if you look between 2015
    and 2017, you can see that there's a little bit of a dip in
    terms of foreign talent coming into our programs. At the same
    time if you look at the report, you can see that the
    performance of the United States for, say, eighth-grade
    students in math and science is mediocre relative to the rest
    of the world.
        That suggests a couple things. One, we need to continue to
    rely on foreign talent in the medium and the short term. In
    fact, we will always want to be attracting the brightest and
    the best, as Dr. Schmidt has said. At the same time, it is
    critical, it's urgent, it's now we need to figure out how to
    make the pathways there for every American, every ZIP Code,
    every background to find the pathways to be successful in STEM
    at whatever level, whether it's being the skilledworker that
    help keep LIGO going that needs so much more STEM know-how than
    an HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) worker
    needed 25 years ago, but we wouldn't have made the discoveries
    of LIGO without that person.
        But what are we going to do? We need to recognize us
    because of computer scientists, the creativity, critical
    thinking, communication, perseverance, all sorts of things go
    into it. And there are multiple pathways to get there. It's not
    a tower. And because someone has taken a certain number of
    courses and is successfully this way doesn't mean they can't
    participate in the STEM economy. We need to have multiple
    pathways, multiple pipelines. And we need to get on it now.
        Dr. Abdallah. I myself came here to study, came to the
    United States to study. There is a benefit to keep that door
    open. One is others have already paid for that first 13, 14
    years of their studies. And they come from a diverse and
    different background, so they bring with them also other ideas.
        The demographics of our U.S. college students also is key
    because we're not graduating enough students to feed the
    pipeline also. So there is a lot of work to be done there to
    get our U.S. students both educated and prepared to come to
    college. And the best opportunity or the largest opportunity is
    where we haven't made a lot of headway, and that is in the
    underrepresented populations. You know, so that's where the
    opportunity is.
        There's one thing I want to comment also on, and it goes
    across all of these points that we've been discussing, and that
    is we're focusing on the competition and our competitors with
    China, but we're not alone. We have allies. We have people we
    work with in other countries who share our values. And I think
    keeping that relationship in science and technology and basic
    research is extremely important.
        Mr. Baird. I'm close to running out of time, so thank you,
    and I yield back.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Casten.
        Mr. Casten. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you all so
    much for coming.
        I want to echo, all of you have made the comment that, you
    know, so much of our STEM workforce is foreign-born, and all of
    you I think have in some fashion raised concerns about are we--
    do those foreign-born, U.S.-trained engineers choose to stay
    here or go elsewhere?
        I want to focus on a different concern I have that I think
    we are in many ways keeping them out in the first place. I'm a
    chemical engineer by training. I went to Dartmouth for my
    master's degree, did my research on cellulosic biofuels because
    I really wanted to be a Member of Congress one day, and served
    for 10 years on their Corporate Collaboration Council, which
    essentially was alumni trying to make sure the degree program
    remained professionally relevant.
        In the first 2 years of the Trump Administration with the
    Muslim ban, with the rhetoric coming out, we saw 30 percent and
    then 30 percent again declines in applications of foreign
    students to the program. Now, our matriculation rate stayed
    fairly high, you know, thanks to the hard work of the
    Administration, but obviously you start to get into real
    concerns of can you maintain the same caliber of institution
    with a smaller application pool?
        I'd like to submit for the record--I ask unanimous consent
    if I could an ICEF Monitor story that came out in April 2019,
    which says that over the most recent 2 years we have seen
    steady declines in the number of foreign-born students on
    active student visas in the U.S., suggesting that is not just
    our singular experience up in New Hampshire.
        So my first question is just a simple one for all of you.
    We've all agreed and I think on a bipartisan basis that we
    should double U.S. R&D budgets. Can we effectively spend those
    R&D dollars and get the most out of that research if we're not
    allowing talented foreigners to participate?
        Dr. Souvaine. We need to make this country a magnet for
    people all over the world, for foreign-born talent and for
    domestic talent, to come here and to contribute to the
    innovation that happens here and our economy and our security
    and around the world. So we need to be open and accessible. And
    we can entice more people. And it's more competitive right now.
    As other countries enhance their own portfolios, globally
    mobile talent has more options of where to go. We need to be
    the place that they want to be.
        Mr. Casten. I'm taking that as you'd agree. I mean, I'm
    assuming--and please chime in if any of you think that keeping
    foreigners out is a good way to maximize our research spending.
    I'll take that as a no.
        Do any of you believe that the decline in foreign students
    studying in the United States reflects a decline on the part of
    the desire of foreign students to come study in the U.S., would
    you share my view that this is a just declining numbers of
    visas available?
        Dr. Souvaine. I think there are more options and there are
    more countries that are providing resources. We need to make
    sure that we have the research infrastructure that means that
    they can come here and do the research that they want to do. We
    need to have the funding and the pathways certainly with visas
    and the ability to stay here. So I think we need to do our
    work.
        Dr. Schmidt. Pretty much every country has figured out that
    leadership in our area that we're discussing, especially in AI,
    is going to be part of national competitiveness, national
    security, and economic things. All of them have programs to try
    to keep their people from leaving and coming to the United
    States. So there is an issue that talent is becoming more
    globally competitive. The good news is the American model
    remains very attractive.
        Mr. Casten. OK. Dr. Abdallah, if I could close with you. I
    think that if we tell the best and the brightest around the
    world that we don't want you here, it's a good way to make sure
    we don't attract the best and the brightest to our shores.
        You mentioned in your testimony the one consequence of U.S.
    research efforts falling behind the rest of the world is that
    our country will be less able to attract the best and brightest
    minds from abroad. Would you say then that our failure to
    create a fair immigration system could cause damage that would
    be harder to repair down the road? And when we get beyond our
    current xenophobic era, what should we do to restore some of
    that credibility?
        Dr. Abdallah. I think, as you just heard, we want to
    continue to be a magnet. And if we are, if we open our
    applications and if we make it so that the work that we're
    doing in here and we invest into our science and technology,
    then they will come. The reason today--one of the reasons why
    everybody else is copying our model is because it was working.
    And when we changed our model, then I think it becomes a lot
    less attractive. I think the best and the brightest want to go
    to where they're welcome but also where they can do their best
    work. And I think that's what we need to continue to do.
        Mr. Casten. Thank you. I yield back.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Balderson.
        Mr. Balderson. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you,
    panel, for being here this morning.
        Two questions, two-part question. Dr. Souvaine, I'll ask
    you first. As the Chair of the National Science Board, can you
    comment on how the National Science Foundation is working with
    private industry and what more you think needs to be done to
    encourage those partnerships and the impact that we can expect
    from the greater involvement?
        Dr. Souvaine. I think at the current time there's more
    partnership that is happening between the Foundation and
    industry. And certainly with the proposal that was discussed
    earlier about incentivizing NSF to do more with translation,
    that helps make it more possible.
        I think also in light of a question that happened earlier,
    I think that there are sometimes impediments to partnerships
    being kicked off. There are one-off relationships that have to
    be created. And I know right now there's work being done
    looking at the Bayh-Dole Act. I believe NIST is chairing and
    NSTC (National Science and Technology Council) is convening and
    kicking off some discussions and they issued a paper I think a
    few months ago about ways to accelerate partnerships and have
    to remove any barriers.
        But I think clearly right now it's going to be key to
    accelerate the partnerships among government agencies,
    industry, and the universities and make sure that we make the
    system frictionless. We accelerate our innovation as quickly as
    we can.
        Mr. Balderson. And I agree with that. Dr. Schmidt, what can
    Congress do to further support the government-industry-academia
    research relationship?
        Dr. Schmidt. I outline some of the comments in my report. I
    think there are some mechanism changes as to how funding occurs
    to be a little bit more flexible. I think we would probably all
    agree with that. More money is obviously important. More shared
    facilities. I highlighted, for example, research cloud, other
    things like that is sort of a reasonably obvious list of
    infrastructure that would help both industry, private, and
    cause things to occur faster. All of the issues around talent
    that were previously discussed, all the focus on STEM also
    helps.
        But I think if you think about it, it's a small group. What
    do they need? They need a few more people, they need to rush
    fast, they need some infrastructure. This is not relatively
    expensive compared to like cyclotrons. And off they go. That's
    the American model of creativity, and it's extraordinarily
    valuable. Seventeen of the top 20 research universities in the
    world are Americans today. This is a crown jewel of our
    country.
        Mr. Balderson. You brought up the financial piece, and that
    was my second part of the question. How can we use these
    partnerships to overcome some of these financial barriers? Any
    thoughts or suggestions? And anybody on the panel can answer
    that also.
        Dr. Schmidt. Well, in general, the government is
    complicated to spend and partner money with for many, many
    reasons. And I think having relatively simple ways for light
    partnerships where people say, look we're going to work
    together on this where it's clear where the intellectual
    property goes is probably a simplification that would be
    helpful.
        Dr. Abdallah. I think supporting infrastructure, you know,
    which sometimes is costly. You know, it's not as costly as what
    Dr. Schmidt mentioned in some cases, but that would be one
    area.
        I think collaboration with the national laboratories, too,
    is key in this space. You know, we have also another piece of
    this research ecosystem, a lot of work that's being done at the
    national laboratories both for national security, national
    defense, but also for other areas and collaborating with
    universities and companies there is important.
        You know, in order to create disruptive innovations,
    sometimes what we really need is consistency in funding and
    clarity in regulations. A lot of times, you know, if we have
    that, then we can let the imagination of the researchers and so
    on go. So it is extremely important to have the funding for the
    basic research. I think a lot of times it is in the policy
    domain that I think we can use a lot of help.
        Mr. Balderson. OK. Thank you. Dr. Souvaine?
        Dr. Souvaine. To just go back to your question about NSF
    and partnering with industry, one recent highlight is that the
    CISE (Computer and Information Science and Engineering)
    Directorate and the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
    Directorate are partnering with Amazon jointly to support
    research that's focused on fairness in AI with a goal of
    contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily
    accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing
    society.
        There are other partnerships that they have recently
    created with Google and Boeing, again, to capitalize on areas
    of research that are of interest to both parties but to
    reiterate that each one takes a lot of startup time to get
    going because of various pieces of friction that make it
    possible.
        Mr. Balderson. Thank you very much. Madam Chair, I yield
    back.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Beyer.
        Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Madam Chair. I was fascinated by Dr.
    Schmidt's opening thoughts on doubling the Federal R&D budget,
    and I've heard this from all of you. We see from the paperwork
    that was 0.7 percent last year and 1.6 to 1.9 percent in 1960,
    so basically, you know, 40 percent, 35 percent. Should we look
    at this as a long-term commitment to a specific percentage of
    GDP or specific percentage of the Federal budget rather than
    simply doubling the dollars that we have right now? And in
    doing that, how best do we do that, structuring through a
    commitment from the Budget Committee or a resolution of
    Congress saying we commit, for example, the 2 percent of GDP
    for Federal R&D?
        Dr. Schmidt. These things are ultimately a consensus at the
    national level. And we are well below the numbers that got us
    to where we are now using any set of metrics. So what happened
    with Sputnik was the national challenge, which was seen as a
    national security challenge, boosted that. So we face something
    which is analogous but different, the challenge of a globally
    focused competitor in China. And if that's the necessary
    reasoning to get us back onto a 2 percent number, I'm
    supportive of it.
        Mr. Beyer. My friend Mr. Casten talked very well about the
    impact of not having a sensible immigration policy on the stay
    rates and the number of people applying. For years, politicians
    from both parties have talked about the STAPLE Act, that when
    you get, you know, a higher degree, we staple the green card to
    it. It never seems to go anywhere.
        Maybe, Dr. Souvaine, do you have any insight on why we
    don't make progress on this?
        Dr. Souvaine. I don't know, but I certainly would like to.
    I think that we have extremely talented people who come and
    complete degrees here and want to stay, and it would be great
    to make the pathways smoother for them to do so and to
    contribute to our society.
        Mr. Beyer. Great. Dr. Schmidt?
        Dr. Schmidt. So I've spent more than 2 decades in Congress
    talking about this particular issue, and what my friends on
    both sides say is that this is an important issue but it gets
    caught up in other and broader political issues. So I would
    encourage you all to think about these are a relatively small
    number of very specialized skills. They're tied to national
    security and the strength of our Nation. Anything that we can
    do for the purposes of this issue to address it as it's in our
    interest for national security, it causes America to grow fast,
    to create companies, and so forth I think would be helpful.
        Mr. Beyer. My friend Dr. Foster talked about how if China
    had the same patent protections, Cisco would own Huawei. And
    yet, Dr. Schmidt, you talked about the dilemma, the absolute
    necessity for us to develop our own 5G competitor. I'm sure the
    private-sector folks, the Verizons, et cetera, are doing that
    right now, but how best do we as a Federal Government stimulate
    and make plausible a global competitor to Huawei?
        Dr. Schmidt. The reason this is so important is that in 3G
    the Europeans led. And through American ingenuity, we became
    the leaders through our telco leadership in 4G LTE. As a
    result, much of the infrastructure was American-made. The chips
    were American-made. The software was American-made. And we
    benefited enormously from early applications on that. So a
    whole bunch of my friends and myself feel very strongly that we
    need a national program around 5G, which enables the telcos to
    get the bandwidth that they need. There's plenty of financing
    if these things work out, and most of its related to access to
    the right bandwidth.
        Mr. Beyer. Good. Dr. Souvaine, did you have anything to
    add?
        Dr. Souvaine. I think the most recent Science and
    Engineering Indicators Report has a lot of information about
    patenting. And one of the questions I find myself asking myself
    as I look at it is the question about patenting in the U.S. and
    patenting in the other countries. And I have a feeling that
    sometimes we patent things in the U.S. and we don't patent
    things in the other countries, and that leads to some of the
    problems that we get into. And I think that a longer look at
    patenting worldwide would be a good thing for us to do at some
    point.
        Mr. Beyer. OK. Madam Chair, I yield back.
        [Audio malfunction in hearing room.]
        Mr. Weber. As Americans, we should all be proud in my
    opinion of the DOE's incredible accomplishments. But, as you
    say, China is in the process of catching up. In your opinion,
    Dr. Schmidt, what would it mean for U.S. leadership in science
    and technology should China pull ahead of our exascale efforts
    and our high-performance computing efforts in general?
        Dr. Schmidt. So high-performance computing in general, of
    which exascale computing is an example, is crucial for energy
    and also for national security, especially nuclear. Much of
    this research has enabled our nuclear leadership and our
    defense posture--and again, there's much classified work on
    this.
        China has focused on what you have called exascale
    computing for more than a decade, and there have been a number
    of times when their computers have been significantly faster
    than ours. Again, it's a race. So once you understand it's a
    race, we have to win this, and we have to continue to win it.
    If we stopped this, we would stop being able to model both the
    national security aspects of this, as well as new innovations
    in renewable energy, traditional energy, new materials. There
    are so many things that are related to the computation that the
    DOE's funding. I cannot emphasize this enough.
        Mr. Weber. Right, especially the new materials. And I'm
    glad to hear you say nuclear as well. Our bill, the Securing
    American Leadership in Science and Technology Act, would
    authorize critical investments in DOE's advanced scientific
    computing programs. It would more than double funding for the
    Department's activities in that area by the year 2029. In your
    opinion, in what ways can we facilitate collaboration with
    American industry--and you came from industry, right--to
    maximize our return on this investment? How do we do that?
        Dr. Schmidt. Well, much of that is going to happen through
    the President's initiatives to modernize the nuclear
    infrastructure, which I'm familiar with and I'm sure you are as
    well, and so I think focusing on getting that right.
        The newest strategy in manufacturing is called basically
    digital twinning. And what you do is you build a computer model
    that's a digital simulation of the physical thing you're
    building. Changing the way we build things--and I'm talking
    about at a national security level, as well as in the
    commercial sector so that we can simulate them using these
    powerful computing resources that you're describing--allows us
    to have more reliable outcomes, more predictable outcomes when
    we actually build them. This is crucial in the nuclear area
    because we can't test these things because of all sorts of
    treaties.
        Mr. Weber. Yes, thank you for that. And I recognize in
    your--I think it was discussion with Dr. Babin you all talked
    about the 5G network. I think you said something to the effect
    that we don't have a competitor and actor large enough to do
    this. Is that what you said?
        Dr. Schmidt. The primary suppliers are Ericsson, Nokia, and
    Samsung. And I would love to see an American set of startups,
    U.S. startups. There's plenty of interesting ideas that could
    come. And I think the easiest way for that to happen is to say
    to them there's going to be lots of spectrum, there's going to
    be lots of competitors. The 5G revolution is coming, and it's
    going to be led in America and not in China.
        Mr. Weber. So you're saying there's going to be lots of
    spectrum. You may or may not be aware that the FCC (Federal
    Communications Commission) has talked about auctioning off some
    bandwidth. Are you familiar with that?
        Dr. Schmidt. I am, and have spent a lot of time on this.
        Mr. Weber. The highway departments have raised an issue
    about that. What can you tell us from your perspective about
    that?
        Dr. Schmidt. So there's a technology that's been around for
    about 10 years called sharing. And as scientists we believe
    that the various objections can be addressed by sharing the
    technology where the government has priority. And this
    technology is relatively new and we think very powerful.
        Mr. Weber. So if they sell off or auction off part of the
    spectrum, does that mean less spectrum available for
    competition?
        Dr. Schmidt. Well, the government has for the last 20 years
    been auctioning spectrum as a property right. That's
    essentially selling the highway to the truck operators. It
    would be better to have the highway be shared among the truck
    operators and the car operators and so forth. And we think
    technologically sharing is the future.
        Mr. Weber. OK. Thank you for that. Madam Chair, I yield
    back.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Bonamici.
        Ms. Bonamici. Thank you to the Chair and Ranking Member,
    and thank you to the witnesses for your expertise. I'm glad to
    see so many people here today interested in this topic.
        I know the title of this hearing is ``Losing Ground: U.S.
    Competitiveness in Critical Technologies.'' I want to start on
    a positive note. We do have some of the best scientists and
    researchers, programmers, engineers in the world. We've seen
    tremendous progress in the development and deployment of high-
    performance computing.
        I want to follow up on Mr. Weber's discussion. In northwest
    Oregon, where I'm honored to represent Intel, recently unveiled
    its Horse Ridge chip processor to accelerate the testing and
    potential of quantum computing. These kinds of technological
    advancements can be used for energy exploration, predicting
    climate and weather, predictive and preventive medicine,
    emergency response, and more.
        Last Congress, we passed the National Quantum Initiative
    Act to strengthen research and development into quantum
    computing and maintain U.S. leadership. The bill established a
    National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee to advise the
    work on this Committee. These investments are needed to meet
    increasing demands and emerging technological changes, but as
    the witnesses demonstrated in their testimony today, we still
    have more work to do, especially to keep pace with our
    international competitors.
        Dr. Schmidt, in your testimony you noted that China has
    almost twice as many supercomputers as the United States. You
    suggested there is need to recalibrate areas of competition and
    cooperation. So what Federal policies would be needed? But also
    are there additional policy provisions that this Committee
    should consider now that the National Quantum Initiative Act
    has been passed and enacted?
        Dr. Schmidt. So, first place, the National Quantum
    Initiative is a fantastic piece of work on your part and is
    very, very helpful. It's going to need more. It's going to need
    more money, more focus, and so forth as it develops, but these
    things develop at a certain level. I think in general I would
    simply refer to the testimony of all three of us, that as a
    policy level it's more resources, more flexibility, more focus
    on the basic research side, consistent with national security,
    understanding that urgency is important. I think my personal
    view is that the formula works really well, and I just want it
    to happen faster. And as the students come out and the faculty
    members come out and the ideas come out, the brilliance of the
    American innovation model in terms of creating companies will
    be competitive.
        And if I can just hammer on the Chinese thing, the Chinese
    have a system called 9-9-6. They work from 9 in the morning to
    9 at night 6 days a week, right? That's what we're dealing
    with. We need to be on that footing.
        Ms. Bonamici. Appreciate that. Dr. Souvaine, your testimony
    highlighted the need for a Federal strategy for basic research
    investments that considers national needs and competitive
    opportunities and lays the groundwork for future discoveries.
    So the Committee is also well aware that Federal support for
    science research and development has remained relatively flat
    since 2000. So what level of Federal investment would be needed
    in our research facilities and infrastructure? And beyond
    increasing Federal investments, what should our Federal
    strategy on basic research include?
        Dr. Souvaine. It's tricky saying what an exact level would
    be. And certainly one of the Congresspeople cited the range
    that we've gone to from back in the 1960s between 1.6 and 1.9
    percent of the GDP was being spent on research and development
    and now it's more like .6 or .7 in terms of the Federal R&D
    spending. The NSB does not have a position on a specific dollar
    amount for R&D spending. What we can say is we can also look
    and say that the total R&D spending in the country is at an
    historic high of 2.8 percent because the business sector has
    stepped up and is being investing a lot more in R&D. At the
    same time we need to realize that when the business sector does
    that, there's a different kind of R&D in general that's being
    supported than what the Federal Government can do.
        Ms. Bonamici. Right. And I just want to call out what seems
    to be a bipartisan agreement that we need more funding, which
    is helpful. I want to try to squeeze in one more question here
    or comment. I want to align myself with the comments of my
    colleagues who talked about the importance of immigration
    reform. And I know that looking at the workforce in northwest
    Oregon. But I also want to talk about the importance of growing
    our own talent here.
        And, Dr. Schmidt, you talked about talent development,
    including K-12.
        Dr. Abdallah, you had that wonderful Martin Luther King Jr.
    quote about the purpose of education, to teach one to think
    intensively and to think critically. That's really important.
        Dr. Souvaine, you had a comment as well about creativity,
    problem-solving.
        I serve on the Education and Labor Committee, and I know
    and have worked for and advocated for well-rounded education,
    K-12. Dr. Abdallah, you said the civics and humanities, I'm the
    Founder and Co-Chair of the STEAM Caucus to integrate the arts.
    Arts education helps boost creativity. It helps people develop
    innovative, creative problem-solving minds. And we found that
    students who participate in the arts are more likely to
    participate in things like math and science fairs, for example.
        So that's just my call out as we talk about these issues
    and developing our own talent here, the arts are not a frill.
    They actually help people to learn--the brain research is to
    learn creatively and critically. And other countries are
    beginning to be ahead of us in that. I just wanted to make that
    point.
        I'm out of time, but we can follow up at another time.
    Thank you, and I yield back.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Gonzalez.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member
    Lucas, for holding this very important hearing. Thank you to
    our panel today.
        Dr. Schmidt, as a GSB grad, it's nice to see you here. I
    didn't have the pleasure of having you in class, but very good
    to see you here.
        I want to start on the talent side. So I've run a startup
    before in Silicon Valley trying to find talent, and the talent
    shortage and competing with an Alphabet as a little itty-bitty
    startup and trying to compete with all that can be offered is
    very challenging. And it shows you just the scope of the
    problem. And so I want to echo a lot of the comments around
    visa reform in particular.
        I think there is kind of two ways to look at it. There's
    the homegrown talent piece, which we all agree we need to
    invest even more dollars in STEM. There seems to be bipartisan
    support for that, so chop chop, let's go.
        And then the second piece, which I just think is insane,
    which is we train people, we bring them in, we give them access
    to our research universities, we spend all kinds of money
    training them, and then we throw them out of the country, which
    I just think is nuts. No business would survive that way if
    that's how they operated. I don't know why we think that's a
    good practice here. But it's not.
        And so I want to start with Dr. Schmidt with this question.
    Put your business hat back on for a second. When you're dealing
    with these shortages, what decisions would you make as a
    company with respect to where to locate talent and hires given
    the tightness of the labor market here?
        Dr. Schmidt. So the good news is that the system that we're
    talking about in the United States is responding to what's
    going on. Computer science has become the number one major in
    most of the leading undergraduate universities, which is a
    shock to me because when I went to college it didn't exist. The
    graduate programs around AI have thousands of applications.
    These are within the universities for 50 slots or 100 slots. So
    we know that the engine is producing the labor, right, and
    that's a great American story.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Right.
        Dr. Schmidt. Furthermore, there's plenty of money for AI-
    based startups to hire these people even at inflated salaries.
    So I think the system is gearing up for success.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Great. Great to hear. And then staying with
    you, you talked about how the AI machine learning race is a
    global one, totally agree. I've been of the perspective for a
    while we need a multidisciplinary approach and standard-setting
    as we deal with some interesting ethical dilemmas and tech
    dilemmas and things like that. Structurally, how would you go
    about solving sort of the standard-setting challenge to make
    sure that, as these technologies develop in China, for example,
    is playing by a set of rules that are informed by sort of
    western liberal democracies if you will?
        Dr. Schmidt. I doubt China is going to want to follow our
    rules about surveillance----
        Mr. Gonzalez. I sincerely doubt it.
        Dr. Schmidt [continuing]. And privacy and so forth. There
    are probably areas where we can collaborate in standards. The
    most obvious one is AI safety. Let's imagine that an AI system
    begins to do something that is not expected. That's not in
    anyone's interest. And so having a discussion about that,
    especially in a military context, is probably very important.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Yes, so that was actually going to be my next
    question. So don't comment specifically on this project, but
    the Project Maven, which at one point Google was involved in
    and had some controversy inside Google. Palantir may or may not
    be doing it, if you listen to their CEO's comments.
        Talk about on the national security front how important it
    is to lead on AI machine learning with respect to kinetic
    warfare because there's clearly going to be a blending of those
    technologies.
        Dr. Schmidt. So I'll tell you what I've told the Department
    of Defense. AI today started as largely a vision revolution.
    And computers today have better vision than humans. They see
    deeper, they see more accurately. They don't make those
    mistakes. So most of the initial use of AI is going to be in
    vision-related. Which is why in the commercial sector the
    biggest impact will be in health care and will revolutionize
    health care, which is an amazing story. In the military, much
    of the military in peacetime is spending its time watching
    things, intelligence, and so forth and so on. And you have
    expertly trained soldiers, airmen, and so forth who are sitting
    there watching screens all day bored as they could possibly be.
    We can fix that.
        Mr. Gonzalez. Yes. And, you know, I guess one thing I want
    to encourage the body on is if we stop, right, if we just say,
    hey, we are not going to be the Project Mavens of the world,
    surely China will. And if we see the ground on that type of
    technology, I think we're putting our national security at
    risk. And I think that's something we all agree we shouldn't be
    doing. So with that I yield back.
        Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Perlmutter.
        Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to our
    panelists. Dr. Schmidt, I don't know if you remember, a number
    of years ago you came and spoke to some of us in the Library of
    Congress. And your topic was similar to today's, just generally
    how do we maintain such an effective both educational and
    commercial system.
        And so over the last 10, 12 years--and you've used the
    racing and the running metaphor, I mean, have we been losing
    ground or falling behind in the race faster and faster or how
    would you describe it? Because when we talk about a race,
    there's usually a finish line, OK, but this one, we keep
    running, Japanese come in or the Russians come in, the Chinese
    are drafting us and circling around us. In this race just
    listening to the testimony, it's talent, it's resources, it's
    incentives, kind of what you've been talking about. In losing
    ground, are we losing it faster and faster? And in the talent,
    resources, incentives kind of categories, what best can we do
    to get back and pass these guys back up?
        Dr. Schmidt. So if you look at the last 50 years, America
    has faced many challenges that have had a technological basis.
    And we've overcome them in this formula that you described. And
    I think we should be incredibly proud of that. It's a strength
    of our country that, you know, it got me to where I am. It got
    all of us to where we are.
        So the question now is you face a new competitor in the
    form of a large competitor operating in a different way, right?
    It's moving quickly and has publicly stated their objectives.
    Well, how does America face that? We don't cower. We don't sit
    there and say, oh, that's OK. We get our act together and we
    focus, we create a sense of urgency, and we figure out how to
    solve problems. Let's solve the problems of getting foreign
    students in here that we need. Let's solve the problems around
    5G. Let's solve the problems around getting the Federal
    Government to have the technology people that they need. They
    need these people. The military needs these people. Let's have
    them work together. There's all sorts of good technological
    solutions that we can invent together using this.
        Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you. Dr. Abdallah, any comments?
        Dr. Abdallah. I agree completely. I want to add something
    about solving the talent problem, for example. So at Georgia
    Tech about maybe 7, 8 years ago we were asked to see if we can
    deliver a quality master's degree in computing at a scale. And
    initially the conventional wisdom was you cannot do that.
    Today, I'm proud to say that we actually have 10,000 students
    who are getting a degree from Georgia Tech and a master's in
    computing for $7,000 or less, a lot less.
        So there are solutions. There are creative solutions. This,
    by the way, did not come from within Georgia Tech. It came from
    someone outside of Georgia Tech who came and shopped around.
    But today we're able to serve or educate about 8 to 9 percent
    of master's students. So there are these ideas that are
    emerging from different places, and I think, you know, my hope
    is that we can connect the ideas together, connect the
    resources together and facilitate both the flow of policy
    funding and resources because some of these solutions may be
    solved better at a small company, some of these problems at a
    small company versus a large company, at a national lab or
    across the world with one of our allies in Europe or elsewhere.
        Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you. Dr. Souvaine?
        Dr. Souvaine. Actually, I wanted to mention a program at
    Georgia Tech. At a younger age where there's a middle school
    program, which is doing a wonderful job at exciting middle
    schoolers to go into STEM. And, again, if that could be scaled
    also--I want to see us be able to more quickly share best
    practices and have them infect the rest of the country. View it
    like a virus.
        There was a wonderful conversation that Dr. Karen
    Marrongelle, who's the Director of EHR at NSF, had with the
    Board in November where she talked about best practices about
    programs that they could prove at NSF with their educational
    research work. If 4-year-olds to 6-year-olds do this, 5 or 6
    years later they're still excited about math and science. But
    at the end of the project it's proven to work and it sits on a
    shelf. How do we generalize, how do we disseminate?
        Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you. I was going to talk about Libra
    and Colibra and creating a digital currency by a dominant
    player in this technology sphere that's taken it all offshore,
    and I worry about surveillance and I worry about knowing
    everything. But, Dr. Schmidt, I'll just leave that alone.
        Mr. Foster [presiding]. Thank you. The gentleman from
    California, Mr. McNerney, is recognized for 5 minutes.
        Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the Chair. I thank the
    panelists. This is really informative this morning.
        Mr. Schmidt, my district includes Stockton, California, and
    I'm really proud of Stockton because it's the first city to
    launch an AI strategy. But it has this history of economic
    hardship. It's working hard to revitalize and turn that around.
    U.S. News & World Report recently reported that Stockton is the
    most racially diverse city in the country. And I'm very excited
    about what's going on out there. But I want to talk a little
    bit about what the government--the Federal Government should be
    doing.
        But I want to point out and make a plug for my AI in
    Government Act, which will create a center of excellence within
    the GSA (General Services Administration) to provide resources
    to the different agencies.
        Mr. Schmidt, what steps should the government be taking in
    your opinion to help address the risks of bias in artificial
    intelligence systems?
        Dr. Schmidt. So there's a great deal of concern about AI
    bias in the community. And the way to understand the problem is
    that AI today is largely trained from data that's in the real
    world, so whether it's from language or processes or loan
    applications or whatever, it's trained from what it has seen.
    And we know that these systems have biases in them. We're not
    debating that. So the research that's underway is how do we
    correct the model when it comes out to limit any unintended
    bias? This is an issue that pretty much all of the technology
    companies have identified as a key part of their ethics
    principles. It's not solved yet.
        Mr. McNerney. Is there a role for the Federal Government to
    solve it?
        Dr. Schmidt. This is a great opportunity to plug for more
    research funding in these areas. It's an area of very active
    research in the universities.
        Mr. McNerney. Well, thank you. The AI and cyber threats is
    also an interesting sort of area. Is that something you're
    concerned about and how AI can be used to help us defuse cyber
    threats?
        Dr. Schmidt. Well, AI will definitely be used to watch--
    remember, I discussed that AI is a monitoring system that
    today, a vision. It'll be used for dynamic monitoring. You
    simply can't monitor everything. And it's reasonable to expect
    at a national security level that you'll be able to look at all
    of the things going on, and the AI will say something's up, I
    can't tell you why, but look over here. It can't tell you why
    because it doesn't understand, but it said there's an unusual
    pattern here or there, and that's the state-of-the-art.
        Mr. McNerney. Is that deployable in home computers?
        Dr. Schmidt. You would do this in classified settings I
    think.
        The other thing that is of concern is that there are people
    who think that the models themselves can be corrupted, in other
    words, an attacker can take the model and change it after
    you've trained it in such a way that it doesn't do what you
    wanted. And that general issue around AI safety is also
    important.
        Mr. McNerney. Well, how do you think the Federal Government
    can help universities produce AI talent?
        Dr. Schmidt. Again, I think the universities are fantastic
    in what they do. They need more funding, more infrastructure
    along the lines of what everyone has said.
        Mr. McNerney. Thank you. Dr. Souvaine, I really appreciate
    your comment that it can no longer be socially acceptable to be
    bad at math, but how do we change that? I mean, how do we
    attack that? Or anyone on the panel that has an answer to that.
        Dr. Souvaine. It's really complicated because education is
    done all over the country in local school districts--I mean,
    there's so many levels--there's local government, there's State
    government, there's the Federal Government. There's the
    schools, there's the training of teachers. It's a huge network
    of educational systems. And yet I was so excited by what I
    referred to, Karen Marrongelle's presentation at the November
    Board meeting where they could present actual programs that
    have done longitudinal studies and shown that if 4-year-olds to
    6-year-old do X, and then when they're older they're doing Y,
    that they are progressing in their understanding.
        We need to expand our whole understanding. You know, I
    think that when I go someplace and someone says I was great at
    math till 7th grade and then I hit the ceiling, there is a
    sense that there's a ceiling. And yet people learn this way or
    that way or the other way. They learn all sorts of different
    ways, and we have to view it as our charge to empower every
    citizen to have what they need, and every citizen needs to read
    and write, and every citizen needs to be comfortable thinking
    mathematically or computationally. And we can do that.
        Anecdotally, I had a degree in both math and English, and I
    taught 10th grade math and 10th grade English at the same time
    in a high school. And I found that someone who's really good at
    English I could use that skill to help them be better at math.
    And if they were really good at math, I could help them be
    better at English. That's what the convergence is about, the
    convergent thinking is about, that the mixture of disciplines
    we can access the creativity of how we all think, and we can
    all contribute to the thinking that needs to be happening in
    the generations that go forward.
        Mr. McNerney. For just a second here, in the Bay Area and a
    little beyond it's kind of cool to be a nerd and a geek, but
    how do we get that out to the rest of the country? I mean, is
    Hollywood going to be an important part of this or social
    media? And if the Chairman will indulge me, I'll let Mr.
    Schmidt take a shot at this.
        Dr. Schmidt. I think Big Bang Theory has certainly helped
    and, you know, television and media matter a lot. As you know,
    a lot of people are now using the Khan Academy software, which
    has a very large mathematical component, to supplement their
    learning. I think building a movement around parents to say
    that the math education my kid is getting is not good enough;
    I'm going to supplement it with all sorts of free services
    would be helpful.
        Mr. McNerney. Thank you. I yield.
        Mr. Foster. Thank you. And Members are advised if they're
    interested in another brief round of questions that we'll make
    a shot at that.
        And Representative Lamb from Pennsylvania is now recognized
    for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Lamb. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Dr. Souvaine, just to kind of follow a little bit further
    down that same trajectory, I think the point about middle
    school and high school is extremely important. Also very
    challenging for us from the Federal level. And there are those
    that are more than me about it. But, you know, we've seen a
    little bit of a flatness in educational attainment and testing
    in those levels over time.
        To me in the short term what's a little bit newer or maybe
    more promising is the transition to convincing young people
    that there are other post-high school options besides an
    immediate 4-year degree and trying to get more people to go
    down the path of job-training skills, community colleges. And
    so just having listened to and seen your testimony, what
    specific institutions do you think are best to steer people
    toward--you mentioned community colleges specifically. Would
    you say they are the best? Have you seen apprenticeship
    programs or other models just kind of quickly? What are the
    actual places where it's being done well?
        Dr. Souvaine. We published a report last year on the
    skilled technical workforce, and we did that after a series of
    listening sessions. And so there's a number of places that we
    visited that had NSF ATE (Advanced Technological Education)
    funding which showed that they were partnerships between the
    community college, the university, and the industry and the
    local area. And together they were creating pipelines where
    students were so excited. They were doing terrific work and
    going directly into jobs that were paying $80K without a----
        Mr. Lamb. Yes, that confirms what we've seen out my way as
    well. But it seems like the community college is often the best
    suited to kind of lead that partnership as the deliverer of the
    training with those partners.
        Dr. Abdallah, I thought your example from Georgia of the
    $7,000 or $9,000 or whatever it was master's degree. Can a
    major university like yours also offer something like that
    short of a bachelor degree or is it better done at a kind of
    smaller institution that you support?
        Dr. Abdallah. Actually, we do collaborate and cooperate
    with community colleges and high schools and others to do that.
    In fact, in Georgia right now there is a bill that passed last
    year and funded to try to put computer science education
    earlier and earlier, which I think is also important is to
    start injecting computing thinking or computer science earlier.
        Mr. Lamb. Great. Thank you. Last question, Dr. Schmidt, I
    think you've addressed pieces of this, and I apologize if I
    missed some of it. But often when we talk about the comparison
    with China, we talk about kind of overall dollar amounts. But
    my sense is from what you and others have said is there's also
    a qualitative difference about how we do the R&D here versus
    there and the ecosystem we have and how we spend the money that
    we invest. Is there kind of a short way of explaining that,
    what's different about just the way we do it here in the
    culture we set up versus how it's being done over there?
        Dr. Schmidt. Well, you know, 10 years ago people were of
    the opinion that China would not get to this point. There was a
    sort of American--if I may say arrogance that somehow we're
    better than them because of our model. And it looks to me like
    their model is different. So theirs is heavily government-
    funded around the programs that I identified in my testimony,
    which include AI, 5G, finance, and so forth, all areas of
    critical infrastructure for America as well. But they do it
    pretty much top-down. It's much more structured, and there's
    much less, shall we say, individual freedom in pursuit of
    activities. However, the product is very good and very much a
    number two today, on its way to being number one in some areas.
        The American model can be understood as much more messy,
    right? It's much more--many different--it's a partnership and
    so forth. But as Dr. Souvaine said, the model that has worked
    well for America has been these local collaborations where the
    government and the local people are solving some problem, in
    this case, STEM education. That flexibility is more fundamental
    than it appears because it allows for strategic flexibility. It
    allows for the businesses to be more flexible. It allows for
    everything to move quicker.
        The Chinese advantage is that they have access to very
    inexpensive capital from the government, and they also have a
    culture of Chinese entrepreneurialism and wealth creation
    that's historic. And so that has driven this enormous internet
    phenomena inside of China, which is an issue in terms of their
    own internal politics but is nevertheless impressive.
        Mr. Lamb. Thank you very much. Mr. Chair, I yield back.
        Mr. Foster. Thank you. And I will now recognize myself for
    5 minutes for I believe the last set of questions here.
        You know, we have been struggling with the immigration
    problem for, you know, more than a decade. And there was an
    interesting thing that happened last year where the U.S. House
    passed with a large bipartisan margin something called the Ag
    JOBS Act, which was essentially comprehensive immigration
    reform for agriculture workers and their families. And so we
    had the large number of Democrats and Republicans vote for
    this, something that in previous years they would have called
    amnesty.
        And so the question that I have is whether there may be a
    pathway to comprehensive immigration reform that is sector by
    sector, that along those lines I introduced last year the Keep
    STEM Talent Act that is a rifle shot at the high skill thing.
    It simply provides permanent resident status to international
    students who've completed advanced STEM degrees at U.S.
    educational institutions and are interested in continuing
    research.
        And so I just wanted to highlight that because, you know,
    we've struggled and failed with comprehensive immigration
    reform, but I was startled to see the broad support for a
    single-sector approach in this. And I think there may be a
    possibility in the tech sector as well because of the
    bipartisan support for that.
        The other thing I'd like to bring up is of the different
    models for funding both fundamental and applied research, one
    of them is to allow the funding agency or the government to
    retain an equity stake in the startups. For example, Israel
    sort of famously does that. The Chinese do it implicitly with
    their state-owned enterprises. And universities retain an
    equity stake in things that spinoff. And I was wondering if you
    think there's a merit for us looking into that as a systematic
    way of not--of increasing the pie? You know, if we had--for
    example, the government had retained a 5 percent equity stake
    in Google, that might have made a transformative difference in
    our ability to fund R&D.
        Dr. Schmidt. While I acknowledge the point, I will point
    out that the tax revenues to the government of these companies
    so far exceeds the value of that 5 percent, so if you think
    about it, the number of jobs that are created, the economic
    infrastructure, the sort of positioning of the technology
    innovation engine--and, by the way, that includes things like
    fracking, right, in terms of its impact that it had on the
    Midwest. Over and over again the early money which is seen as a
    sort of gift can be better understood as an investment for 5 or
    10 or 15 years from now for huge wealth creation for the
    Nation, which the country does get in the form of its tax
    revenues.
        Mr. Foster. Dr. Souvaine?
        Dr. Souvaine. My former capacity as VPR where our tech
    transfer was one of the portfolios I would say that there was
    not a lot of return on the patents that we had. But where there
    was the university's share was used to reinvest in basic
    research in a way that didn't require the administrative
    burdens of massive numbers of grant proposals for 3 years, et
    cetera. And so that in a sense it is serving the Federal
    Government as it currently is and having the share in the
    university when it occurs because it is re-ceding something
    that the government cares about. It cares about the results of
    basic research.
        Mr. Foster. Yes. And the patent royalty model for
    universities is long-standing. Did you have any comments on
    having a look at, for example, the Israeli model, which is sort
    of an intermediate.
        Dr. Abdallah. Well, so most universities do not keep equity
    in the usual sense. I mean, there are different models, but
    usually the universities in this space would encourage
    licensing or trying to help from that point of view.
        I do want to say that the Federal dollar does multiple
    roles. It has multiple roles. It pays for the research. It pays
    for the education of the students who are also going to go out
    and create more research and get jobs. And it also potentially
    spins off these companies. So the investment is--has three
    different sources eventually of trying to recover or to try to
    pay back.
        As far as the universities are concerned, this is a role
    that they assumed, you know, gladly assumed to try to
    commercialize and try to get the research out, but it is not
    something that pays off in the short term. You know, at a place
    like Stanford, for example, I think they have three companies
    that gave back more than $100 million so you think about
    Stanford as generating all of these companies. I think overall
    out of the thousands and thousands and thousands of companies,
    you know, the very few will get about $1 million. So it's a
    high-risk place, and I think it's important to keep the model
    that we have right now.
        I'm not sure--I haven't studied the Israeli model or
    getting equity into that, you know. I'd be happy to have that
    at Georgia Tech, but I don't----
        Mr. Foster. Any comments on that for the record. I guess
    we're out of time here. But, you know, before drawing the
    hearing to a close, I want to thank the witnesses, though I
    have to say the most exciting thing that I heard was a
    statement from my colleague, the Ranking Member Mr. Lucas, that
    he was strongly in favor of doubling the Federal R&D budget.
    And so that's got to be the most exciting thing that we've seen
    here.
        And the record will remain open for 2 weeks for additional
    statements by the Members and for any additional questions the
    Committee may ask of the witnesses.
        The witnesses are now excused, and the hearing is now
    adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 12:10 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

                                   Appendix I

                                  ----------

                       Answers to Post-Hearing Questions

    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                                  Appendix II

                                  ----------

                       Additional Material for the Record

    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                                     [all]